An eerily prescient utopian-dystopian novel set in a world where people pop happy pills like daily vitamins for synthetic joy and blissful unawareness.

n  O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!n
Miranda, The Temptest, William Shakespeare

Read as part of >The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003.

My reading of this book has been an adventure in itself, not just in a metaphorical sense but in an incredibly boring physical adventure. I began it in September, but then I was marvellously interrupted by the 2016 Rio Olympics and that put any kind of continuation at bay for at least the rest of the year. I was 3/4 of the way through, but once I found myself in a mental state capable of getting back to this book, I read it straight through (with only two Six Nations Rugby Union matches to stop me, this time).

I'd not suggest I didn't enjoy the book enough to keep me going, but apparently Sport trumps Utopian-facade Dystopian sci-fi at the moment.

"A love of nature keeps no factories busy."

The setting up of the book is quite a wonderful experience. There are glimmers of our own world here, things that aren't quite so obvious at first but definitely exist. The continuing plundering of hate and fear-mongering by the media is in evident now as it is in Brave New World, though who is doing the peddling is a little different. The time and place are almost irrelevant-whether it is 10 years in the future of 1000-because we can still envision these things are happening now.

It is an English-heavy perspective of the future, which is fair enough considering the author, though perhaps off-key a little. The characters are all fairly vague, which only solidifies how non-unique they are, how they are so very much treated like numbers and statistics rather than individuals. Take any poll now, any survey, any service and you'll know how we are all becoming just statistics.

But the characters aren't necessarily meant to be anything heavy, and that's the point. Even Bernard is pretty much like anyone else in the end, despite him always feeling (and looking) different. In the end, we all just want to belong, at least somewhere.

"You can't consume much if you sit still and read books."

The underlying message of this book-and of quite a few other futuristic, dystopian kind of books, is that Reading Books Is Good For You. Most of the good books are there to help you think and form your own opinions. The books that throw one kind of opinion in your face and force you to believe it are mostly known as newspapers or comment sections. Thankfully we haven't quite gotten to the point where books are being banned, but we're certainly at a point where opinions are being repressed and, if you have an opinion yourself that isn't quite what everyone else likes, then you're wrong and probably racist.

"You can't consume much if you sit still and read books" is probably the best quote, not just of this book, but of the whole genre. Consumerism is a rather broad term: under capitalism it is despicable, but under socialism it could be wonderful. We all need to consume to live, but we don't need to consume as much as they do in Brave New World. Not mending, not bothering to even try to think about fixing things, not thinking. Being told what to do, being told how to do everything, being told how to live your life. And for what? Being "happy", without wars and famine and disease? Without ageing, wrinkles-without boundaries. It's almost as if there are no rules.

"Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."

As for why it isn't quite on par with something like 1984, I suppose it doesn't quite hit as hard as 1984 did. The writing isn't bad, but neither is it wonderful or particularly evocative. There is a kind of poetry missing to the writing, it is missing a sense of doom co-mingled with a certain kind of brightness.

It was good, but it didn't quite show me the way after it made me think. Thinking is good and it should be actively encouraged, but there are times when thinking is not always enough and, once opinions are formed, some kind of semblance of what should come next is needed.

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery... And being contended has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune..."

I suppose part of my problem with these kinds of books is that without the bad there'd be no good. No thing can exist without an opposite: we need evil to understand good, and starvation to understand satiation, and horrible to understand nice. But Brave New World understands that concept through the use of Soma. No use for opposites in a Utopian society where every one is happy: in fact, no need for the word happy. There is only Being.

I thought I should read this having recently finished 1984. This book was not particularly well written or easy to read. The first few chapters were especially confusing.

It is sometime in the future and the world is a very different place. Babies are being manufactured in laboratories staffed by ever youthful adults who were also grown in labs. Deformities and disabilities have been eliminated. Individuality in appearance, thought and speech no longer exists within the civilised communities. Everyone has been conditioned from birth to think the same thoughts and behave in the same manner as everyone else. They are conditioned to make mass purchases of products to ensure consumerism ticks over. Everything they could wish for is on tap including sex with anyone they choose. There are no individual relationships and feelings are largely absent being seen as a weakness.

Bernard is not quite the same as everyone else, he feels uncomfortable and that there must be more to life than conditioning and duplicated experiences. He stumbles into uncivilised areas full of savages in his search for humanity. The savages seem to be remarkably similar to the human race as we know it. What will Bernard make of the fascinating horror that he has discovered and what will he do with his knowledge?

For some reason I found this book more chilling than 1984. The ideas were just a little too close to home to make enjoyable reading. Governments and those that think they know best are progressively conditioning the human race to think, act and speak alike through political correctness. They are eliminating all uncomfortable topics and subjects. People are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. They seek things for themselves at the expense of others. That is what happens when people abandon God and He eventually leaves them to their own devices. Brave New World may not be as far off as we think.....

For Christians, however, we can take comfort in knowing that all things are in God's hands and under His control. That nothing can happen without His allowing it and that one day Jesus will return and this earth will pass away.

Brave New World may make readers think. But it has a lot of sexual content some of which is quite graphic although not explicit. There is the odd swear word and some violence. For those reasons I wouldn't recommend it for sensitive readers.

Huxley’s satirical utopia is manifest, situated in university halls of residence, where promiscuity is rampant (who can forget the days of swapping partners between lectures, waking up to nubile posh cherubs lapping at your working-class cheeks, ruddy with decades of industrial grime and boyhood labour), and where the morning-after swig of two Nurofen (soma) eliminated any wrongdoing and regret, buoying one up for the further adventures in sex and failing grades to come in the whirligig of life? And those savages, known as parents, preaching on the values of 1930s sexual repression because they can’t bear to contemplate their little darlings receiving sustained penetration from varying partners in varying orifices on varying evenings, quoting Shakespeare to try and seem cultured and mask the reality that education, learning, and knowledge are now things closed to them as the years persist, and the only thing they have to cling to are their own memories of rampant romping in the halls of Eros in the bygone days. In this Brave New World you might earn a 2:2 in Media Studies.

CAREFUL OF SPOILERS!
This is a 'viviparous mother' of all dystopian worlds! Yes, 'viviparous', 'mother' or 'father' are indecent jokes in the time of 'Our Ford'.
This world is majorly fucked up, just like its 1984 edition. Perhaps even more so! This one is also a cold one. Here, exogenesis, 'Bokanovsky's Process' and 'Podsnap's Technique' have taken over human progenity. Babies are no longer born, instead they are 'decanted'.
Here, you get to undergo an operation to remove your gametes 'voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary'.
Instead of taking ready-made humans you make them as you like them: pliable and standartised, in neat controlled batches. To do that, you X-ray the poor gametes, freeze them, 'dose almost to death with alcohol'... Along the way, the embryos are even 'simultaneously shaken into familiarity with movement'. Afterwards, they get to be male/female/freemartin and are predestined by some Labelers and conditioned into Alphas to Epsilons by some other perverts. Some of the embryos are even lucky enough to get to love standing on their heads. The electrical conditioning of children on books and roses? Lovely. And the responce from the observers? '"I see," said the student, and was silent, lost in admiration.'
The time of Our Ford is the time when ordinary erotic play is OK for small boys and girls. And for big ones. People are astonished that at some point in time 'Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves?' In this world grownups can get reprimanded for 'lapses from a proper standard of infantile decorum'.
Here 'hypnopædia' is the way to induce the ready-made formulas replacing thinking. For example, children would get in their sleep 'at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude'. 'Happiness is the Sovereign Good' is here a must, and if one is not persuaded, they are sternly advised 'to mend their ways'. One way to do that is to take 'soma', induldge in Solidarity Service (Orgy-Porgy), have a Pregnancy Substitute, undergo compulsory Violent Passion Treatment and pursue pleasures, strictly non-intellectual ones. Сonsumerism is the way of all things.
And 'there is no escape from a Savage Reservation'.'Those, who are born in the Reservation, are destined to die there'.
Q:
CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.(c)
Q:
For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.(c)
Q:
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide... Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress..."bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding."(c)Quantity not quality is the recipe to a brave new world.
Q:
"Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stability"... Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg... "Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!"..."If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved."(c)
Q:
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons.(c)
Q:
...and already the bottle had passed, and it was the turn of the labellers. Heredity, date of fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group–details were transferred from test-tube to bottle. No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room... Told them of the test for sex carried out in the neighborhood of Metre 200. Explained the system of labelling–a T for the males, a circle for the females and for those who were destined to become freemartins a question mark, black on a white ground.
"For of course," said Mr. Foster, "in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve hundred–that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And of course one must always have an enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent of the female embryos to develop normally. The others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course. Result: they're decanted as freemartins–structurally quite normal (except," he had to admit, "that they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards), but sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last," continued Mr. Foster, "out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention."(c)Oh, the joy. Grow a beard and go be free from nature!
Q:
"We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future …" He was going to say "future World controllers," but correcting himself, said "future Directors of Hatcheries," instead.(c)
Q:
"Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par." Again he rubbed his hands.
"But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?" asked an ingenuous student.
"Ass!" said the Director, breaking a long silence. "Hasn't it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?"...
"The lower the caste," said Mr. Foster, "the shorter the oxygen." The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
"Who are no use at all," concluded Mr. Foster.(c)
Q:
"Consider the horse."
They considered it...
Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence. "But in Epsilons," said Mr. Foster very justly, "we don't need human intelligence."
Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!
"Enormous!"(c)
Q:
Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless...They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success.(c)
Q:
"And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."(c)
Q:
The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. "To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained. "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads.(c)
Q:
You can't really do any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails.(c)
Q:
Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks–already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
"They'll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives."(c)
Q:
Why go to the trouble of making it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flowers?...
If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers–flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport.
"And didn't they consume transport?" asked the student.
"Quite a lot," the D.H.C. replied. "But nothing else."
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found.
"We condition the masses to hate the country," concluded the Director. "But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks."(c)
Q:
You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about.(c)
Q:
"What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked.
"We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."...
"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."(c)
Q:
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida–wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.(c)
Q:
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It therefore follows …"(c)
Q:
imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.(c)
Q:
"Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother."
That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.
"Try to imagine what 'living with one's family' meant."
They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.
"And do you know what a 'home' was?"
They shook their heads.
Home...No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells... And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children) … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, "My baby, my baby," over and over again. "My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps …"
"Yes," said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, "you may well shudder."(c)
Q:
Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers–was therefore full of misery; full of mothers–therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts–full of madness and suicide.(c)
Q:
Extremes... meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.(c)
Q:
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
"But every one belongs to every one else," he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.
The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.(c)
Q:
"Fortunate boys!" said the Controller. "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy–to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all."(c)
Q:
"He patted me on the behind this afternoon," said Lenina.
"There, you see!" Fanny was triumphant. "That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality."...
"And after all," Fanny's tone was coaxing, "it's not as though there were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or two men besides Henry. And seeing that you ought to be a little more promiscuous …
Lenina shook her head. "Somehow," she mused, "I hadn't been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn't. Haven't you found that too, Fanny?"
Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. "But one's got to make the effort," she said, sententiously, "one's got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else."
"Yes, every one belongs to every one else," Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny's hand, gave it a little squeeze. "You're quite right, Fanny. As usual. I'll make the effort."
(c)
Q:
"Lenina Crowne?"..."Oh, she's a splendid girl. Wonderfully pneumatic. I'm surprised you haven't had her."
"I can't think how it is I haven't,"..."I certainly will. At the first opportunity."(c)
Q:
"But his reputation?"
"What do I care about his reputation?"
"They say he doesn't like Obstacle Golf."
"They say, they say," mocked Lenina.
"And then he spends most of his time by himself–alone." There was horror in Fanny's voice.(c)
Q:
"What were you playing this afternoon?" the girl on his left enquired. "Obstacle, or Electro-magnetic?"
Bernard looked at her (Ford! it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly had to admit that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him with astonishment. There was an awkward silence.(c)
Q:
There was something called liberalism...Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.(c)
Q:
Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!(c)
Q:
"Yes, everybody's happy now," echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.(c)
Q:
In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. "I do love flying," they whispered, "I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love …"..."Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending."(c)
Q:
You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.(c)
Q:
And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of contraceptives.(c)
Q:
Why don't you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?"
Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut," he answered. "We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas–that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices...Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle–an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,"(c)
Q:
The depressing stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens. But though the separating screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent dissolved, the two young people still retained their happy ignorance of the night.(c)
Q:
He had discovered Time and Death and God.(c)
Q:
You can't teach a rhinoceros tricks," he had explained in his brief and vigorous style. "Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they don't respond properly to conditioning. Poor Devils!(c)
Q:
That mania, to start with, for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but one couldn't do that all the time.) Yes, what was there? Precious little.(c)
Q:
B. considered that ... was a waste of time. "Then what's time for?" asked L. in some astonishment...
"Talking? But what about?" Walking and talking–that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon...(c)
Q:
People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma...We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.(c)
Q:
I like being myself. Myself and nasty.(c)
Q:
"Every one says I'm awfully pneumatic," said Lenina reflectively, patting her own legs.(c)
Q:
"Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at 0ne with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release."
...in the red twilight it was as though some enormous negro dove were hovering benevolently over the now prone or supine dancers.(c)Ok, I really need that funny stuff that Huxley was high on, when he wrote this.

Excelent

There's some provocative discussion of this book in Houellebecq's Les Particules Elémentaires, which I just finished. One of the characters argues that Huxley originally intended his world as a utopia rather than a dystopia, and then changed his mind and tried to convince everyone it was meant ironically.

The proof? Apart from the caste system, which has been rendered unnecessary by computers, this is the world we're busily trying to create for ourselves, and which almost everyone would actually like to live in. Huxley's just telling it like it is. I don't believe Houellebecq's argument, but at least it's different!

A reread for my book club

Considering when this was written it's quite an achievement and in terms of the world Huxley draws up it's vivid and entirely believable brimming with so many great idea's regarding totalitarianism and a future of bio-engineered humans so raises many interesting questions and on the whole it's a very thought provoking read, however there isn't really much of a story here and at times I felt frustrated by the narrative, also the central character of Bernard Marx along with the rest of the population felt a bit cold and empty so became difficult to empathise with, but that all changed for the better when Bernard takes a trip to a savage reservation where the old world still exists and brings back two of their citizens in Linda and her son John which made the second half of the book far more enthralling than the first, so as soon as they were integrated into the new world where a society of comfort and happiness was disrupted by the visitors things became far more interesting and took on a more sympathetic and humanistic approach which was lacking earlier, and for me the last 20 -30 pages were it's best moments bringing to attention issues that are relevant in today's modern world.

Brave New World is a classic written to make its readers uncomfortable. It accomplishes its point well. Still, it is only getting 3 stars from me, as I rate books based on my personal level of enjoyment rather than literary value.

The characters of this book were not meant to be likeable - I am fine with that concept. The first few chapters made me want to curl up in the corner and cry - that's how repulsive the design of this universe was (mission accomplished, Mr. Huxley). But as we plunge into the depths of the neverending moral message of the story (basically the entire last third of the book), I felt my patience stretching thin. I get the message, no need to beat me over the head with it.

I did chuckle at the ridiculous consumerism of this world (inspired by America of the turn of the century) in which, unexpectedly, most characters have distinct socialist names - Lenina, Trotsky, Marx, Bernard (as in G.B.Shaw). I just think it's funny how both of the enemies of Huxley's ideal world - the competing ideologies of socialism and rampant consumerism - were dealt with in one blow. Good try - but come on!

I liked the description of the effects of soma drug on the mind. No wonder, as this was written by the author of The Doors of Perception about mescaline effects on the mind - an interesting read, by the way.

Of the classic trio of dystopian books (this one, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Zamyatin's We) this one is my least favorite (We is the best, in my opinion, and may have actually inspired this one). Brave New World succeeds at portraying dystopia at its worst and making the reader think, but stilted language and moral heavy-handedness take away from the enjoyment. Yet it's a classic, and should be read, even if not for fun. 3 stars.

So that's what I've been missing out on this whole time; I almost wish a teacher did force me to read this book.

There is some clunkiness to Huxley's writing and sentence structure, but that's ultimately beside the point. There are, occasionally, some feelings of dated-ness even though the book has remained relevant remarkably well (or do I mean terrifyingly well?); yet, that too is also beside the point. The real point, is that it's a damn fine hunk of literature; very pneumatic indeed, and I can see why so many readers have had it so frequently and even encouraged others to have it as well.

I do have an issue, however: I can imagine this book being interpreted a wide variety of different ways. Now, since I've never had this book forced on me by school, I don't know what the 'standard' interpretation of a lot of the content is supposed to be. I also have not looked at a single GR review of the book, since I wanted to approach it wholly as a brave new soul. Now that I've finished it, I'm curious.

Do most people focus in on the "everybody belongs to everybody" aspect, and claim that Huxley was railing against the manifestation of a communist society? Or do people zero in on the wretchedness of a society structured around market consumption, and claim that Huxely was really warning against consumer-driven Capitalism? ... Do most people look at the presence of Shakespeare in the novel, and claim that Huxley was really trying to say things like art, literature, and poetry are what make us truly human and life truly worth living? Or do people focus on John's tragic life, and claim Huxley was showing the nasty futility of pursuing such poetic individualism, and that social order really should be maintained in a Utilitarian way?

Some, or all, of these may be correct interpretations, and there may be many more I missed. This novel may mean many things to many people, but that variety doesn't detract from the meaningfulness of the novel. Regardless of what one takes away from the novel, it will have been a rewarding experience.

If you're interested, allow me to open up and share for a moment what I took away from the novel.

My grandmother is currently on her deathbed; she has, at most, a few days left. I finished the last bit of this novel after having come back from sitting with her a while, and I read it through a haze of tears. Not so much tears of sorrow and grief, I had spent most of those on the car ride back from seeing my grandmother, but tears of rage. Rage at the way the world Huxley created deals with death. In Huxley's book, the death of a person is something to make light of, because humans are ultimately worthless. Children are 'death-conditioned' to feel nothing about death; a dying person is as big of a deal as a cat cleaning its paw. There are no cemeteries, or tombs, or urns of remembrance; in 'civilized' society no single person is worth the thought. The dead are disposed of production-line style, only the opposite of production. They are cremated in a factory which is specially designed to capture most of the physical elements and material of the human body, and recycle that material into some other industrial use. It's a wonderfully efficient process, and it left me completely revolted. Things like grief, respect for the dead, or even an acknowledgement of Death's presence, are ideas which have no place in a society of stability and peace. People don't mean anything, more than they are factors in the grand equation of society. People are only worth as much as their material worth and consumption. Even more sickening, is knowing there are people who think like that in our world. To them, people are only commodities to be bought, sold, and traded; hopes, loves, and inner beauty are all unimportant factors when society itself might have to pay for such things.

Even more revolting? I was even, for a moment, envious of such a perception of death. I wish I didn't have to feel the pain, the fear, and the ineffectualness of my own existence. In fact, there was a lot about Huxley's world that actually seemed appealing to me, and it was the most horrifying fact of all.

Regardless of what one takes from this book, and even regardless of what I've ended up focusing on, this book is worth the read. It's a classic in every sense, and as such should be read by all.

Wow, the anger over this rating! My first post for this book was a quote and a gif of Dean from Supernatural rolling his eyes and passing out. And people were pissed. How dare I?

Lol. I'm honestly just so tired of all the dumb comments demanding that I (all caps) "ELABORATE". It's been going on for SIX YEARS now. So I will: This is still one of the most boring emotionless books I have ever read. It seemed like a natural choice after I loved Orwell and Atwood but, my god, Huxley is a dry, dull writer.

Another reviewer called this book a "sleeping pill" and that is a fantastic description. After all the hullabaloo with my original post, I borrowed Brave New World from my local library with the intention of reading it again to give a more detailed review for those freaking out in the comments. And I returned it after suffering through only a few pages. A few years later I got the ebook, thinking I would eventually make it through somehow. But I haven't. It's so mind-numbingly dull. I don't want to do it to myself. The Globalization of World Politics was more enjoyable than this book.