
'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley is a dystopian novel that presents a future society where people are genetically engineered and conditioned to fit into specific societal roles. The story follows characters like Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne as they navigate a world where happiness is superficially guaranteed through recreational sex, drugs, and conditioning. The arrival of an outsider named John Savage challenges the norms of this society, leading to a clash of cultures and a questioning of what it means to be truly human. Huxley's writing style is described as thought-provoking, satirical, and ahead of its time, offering a critique of modern consumer culture and technological progress.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include graphic descriptions of drug and sexual behavior, themes of eugenics, and societal conditioning.
From The Publisher:
Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order whose motto is "Community, Identity, Stability."-all at the cost of our freedom, humanity, and perhaps our souls.
"A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine" (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history's keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a twenty-first-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.
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8 comment(s)
(watched Peacock series 7/2020)
I didn’t care about the characters in the least and that made it really hard to finish the book, even as short as it was. I understand the greater importance of the book is the dystopian and caste system of governance, but I still disliked the story and its characters.
hated the idea, the way he dehumanised people. i get it was the point, and i like distopias, but i just don’t think this was a good one.
one of the greats of dystopian fiction
many people far smarter than i have doubtless said everything i have to say about this book, only smarter and better
but may i point your attention to the zippers?
why are all of their clothes zippered?
we can genetically engineer human beings but we can't figure out something more comfortable to sleep in than a zippered onesie?
and zippered underwear? can we not? is it possible to take the soma and opt out of zippered underwear?
I found the whole thing to be sad and depressing.
This book got good for me when John and The Controller had their conversation about individuality vs the whole. It's a strange thing to read something that makes sense but you are very much against. 3.5 Stars
I liked the contrast of control methodology/theory with that exercised in 1984. Both bring something to think about.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel honestly makes you admire the society we stay in today. In the World State, there is no family, marriage, history, or books. The authorities used to be capable to create this kind of society due to principal technological advancements, giving them the electricity to situation and manipulate their human beings alternatively they want. It is fascinating to assume that Huxley wrote this novel nearly ninety years ago, but he consists of futuristic technologies, like cloning, that he, and others again then, might also have believed we would have today. The authorities designs their society to be productive and stable. They are capable to do this by way of growing their populace thru cloning, presenting greater human beings to do work, and conditioning them to assume less, have little enjoyment time, and be content material with what they have. While the ordinary happiness of their human beings and productiveness of their society is increased, residents are stripped of the proper to suppose for themselves and are hidden from the truth. Throughout the book, it is fascinating to research about how quite bizarre the characters are, how they assume and act, and the relationships that they have with every other.
About the Author:
Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early 20s, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along the Road (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932, this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop,1944, and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Grey Eminence, 1941; and the account of his first mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.
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