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Mention "Brave New World" and someone will almost always bring up George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the other great twentieth-century novel of a controlled future. The pairing makes sense. Orwell imagined a future held together by surveillance and fear. Aldous Huxley imagined one held together by pleasure. Huxley himself made the point in a letter to Orwell: in the long run, he argued, rulers would find conditioning people from infancy more efficient than clubs and prisons. The writer Neil Postman later contrasted the two novels along much the same line.
That is why "Brave New World" still unsettles readers more than ninety years on. Its world has no war, no hunger, and almost no unhappiness. The question it leaves you with is not "How do we escape this?" but "Would we even want to?"
Who wrote it, and when
Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, into a family of scientists. His grandfather was the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley; his brother Julian became a prominent biologist. Huxley went to Eton and then to Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1916 with a first-class degree in English literature. Before that, in 1911, an eye disease called keratitis had left him practically blind for two to three years.
He wrote "Brave New World" between May and August 1931 in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast of France, and Chatto & Windus published it in Britain in February 1932. In 1937 he moved to California, where he lived mainly in the south of the state; he died in Los Angeles County on 22 November 1963. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and in 1958 he came back to the subject in a nonfiction book, "Brave New World Revisited."
The title is borrowed from "The Tempest." Miranda's "O brave new world" is spoken in innocent wonder; Huxley uses it with a raised eyebrow.
Where the story begins
London, in the year 632 AF: "After Ford." Henry Ford, whose assembly line made mass production possible, is honored as the founding figure of the World State. People swear by his name, and the calendar counts from the year the first Model T rolled off the line, which places the story in AD 2540.
Nobody here is born in the old way. Human beings are grown in bottles and assigned a caste before birth, from Alphas at the top down through Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. A single fertilized egg can be made to yield dozens of identical people. Children are shaped by "hypnopaedia," slogans repeated to them as they sleep, until each caste is happy with its own work and its own color of clothing. Whatever discomfort survives can be dissolved with soma, the state's approved drug.
At the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre we meet Lenina Crowne, a young Beta technician who is popular and perfectly at home in this world, and Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus specialist in sleep-learning. Bernard knows better than most how minds are manufactured. He is also shorter than an Alpha is supposed to be, awkward among his peers, and dissatisfied in a society built so that no one ever feels that way.
Where that small crack leads is for you to find out.
What makes it worth reading
It is funnier than its reputation. Much of the World State is presented with a perfectly straight face, which makes it all the more absurd: the factory logic of reproduction, the cheerful slogans, the color-coded castes.
It is also harder to argue with than you might expect. Most people in the book are not suffering, and would be baffled to hear that they should be. Pinning down exactly what is wrong with their lives takes real thought, which makes it an excellent book to talk over with others. It has also stayed controversial: the American Library Association has listed it among the most frequently challenged books in the United States across several decades, and the Modern Library ranked it fifth among the best English-language novels of the twentieth century.
And it is uncomfortably current. Comfort as an end in itself, distraction always within reach, quiet pressure to fit in: none of it needs much translating to a reader today.
One tip: the novel throws a lot of invented vocabulary at you early on. Be patient with the first chapters. Once you know the rules of the world, the pages turn quickly.
Who will enjoy it
Read it if you have finished "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and want the other half of the conversation, if your book club likes a novel that people will disagree about, or if you have ever suspected that convenience comes at a price nobody mentions. If you skimmed it for a class years ago, it rewards an adult reading. You do not need to like science fiction; Huxley is far more interested in people than in machines.
Ninety years on, the World State's offer is still on the table: perfect contentment, no questions asked. Open the book and decide for yourself whether you would take it.
Sources
- Wikipedia, "Brave New World" (written May-August 1931 at Sanary-sur-Mer; published February 1932 by Chatto & Windus; setting in AF 632 / AD 2540; castes, Bokanovsky process, hypnopaedia and soma; the cult of Ford and the AF calendar; Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx as introduced; title from Miranda's speech in The Tempest; Modern Library ranking; American Library Association challenge lists; Huxley's letter to Orwell on conditioning versus clubs and prisons; Neil Postman's comparison of the two novels; Brave New World Revisited) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
- Wikipedia, "Aldous Huxley" (birth and death dates and places, grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley and brother Julian, Eton and Balliol College with a first-class BA in English literature in 1916, keratitis in 1911, move to California in 1937, nine Nobel nominations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley