DNF @ 50%

I know, I know. I'm a peabrain pleb and this is truly a classic and how dare I?

I understand what it's trying to do. I understand the over-enthusiasm for science and the depersonalization. I understand how showing a thriving world devoid of relationships and emotions feels counterintuitive and wrong. ('That's the point!' I understand that's the part that's supposed to 'make you think!') I understand how the conditioning and predestination of this "utopia" sacrifices individuality for compliance and just whoaaaa

I even understand that the frickin orgies and the special drug ("Soma") are representative of the way the people shed their own identities and continue to live a unified existence.

I understand how ground-breaking this was. I understand it raises all sorts of questions and opens discussions about free will, societal control, the role of government and what humanity is.

But it's not for me. This is incredibly dense as the entire first half has been dedicated to showing the science and structure of this 'brave new world.' There's not really a plot and there's not really even characters? (I mean kinda?) It all feels dedicated to driving the same few points home.

I understand. But I'm bored. And I'm tired of the shock-factor of orgies and children engaging in "erotic play"

(This really could have been a short-story and it would have accomplished the same things)

This book covered so many social issues I don't know where to start. But the heart of the book is simple: will we control technology or will technology control us? When you look at the ability to access technology from an early age you can't help but think of the 'stilted' education that some people in our society receive; and to think that this gap can be covered with four years of college is delusional. So we are (de facto) doing exactly what Huxley described in Brave New World - we are intentionally creating different classes by design. The powers that be understand that there must always be social stratification that 'appears' open but in truth is closed. Highest recommendation.

In a dystopian society of genetically engineered consumers pacified by drugs and conditioning, Bernard Marx cannot seem to fit in. When he visits a Savage reservation, his eyes are opened and he brings one of the savages back to England with him...

As I continue my bleak science fiction parade toward the new year, I wonder why I've never read Brave New World before.

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley takes on consumerism, the media, genetic engineering, recreational drugs, religion, herd mentality, individualism, and lots of other socially relevant topics, weaving them into a science fiction setting that our world resembles more every day.

The setting and society are the stars of the show in Brave New World. The people live in a caste system based on genetics, conditioned from birth and pacified by drugs, living to consume goods and take soma to forget their troubles. Free love is encouraged but free thinking is not. Bernard Max can't seem to get with the program and winds up nearly causing a revolution.

The characters are pretty secondary to the setting but it wasn't hard to feel sorry for Bernard, the square peg in a world of round holes. Even when he gets a measure of fame, he still can't manage to shake the feeling that something's wrong. John the Savage provides a nice contrast, an outsider looking in on a world everyone else sees as normal but he sees as hellish.

Huxley may not have thought so at the time but he may have been a futurist. Our culture seems to be moving in the direction of Brave New World all the time. The rampant consumerism, lowest common denominator entertainment, and herd mentality all seem a little too familiar. Is the internet our soma? Things to ponder...

There are some classics that are as hard to read as an insurance policy written in Klingon and then there are ones like this. Brave New World is very readable and not at all dense. The ideas are very easy to absorb, especially in this day and age. In these uncertain times, Brave New World is as timely as ever. Four and a half stars.

This book is frightening. I'll take it to my classroom and subject the innocents to it.

Wow, how does such a slim volume explore so many BIG issues, whilst also telling an interesting story?

Although published nearly 80 years ago (1932), it presciently exposes many issues that are problematic in our time: consumerism; the nature of happiness; what it means to be civilised; cloning and other reproductive technologies; parenting, families, loyalty, promiscuity; recreational drug use; social mobility and equality of opportunity; individualism versus group loyalty; pornography; benevolent dictatorship; censorship; religion; the power of language, and so much more.

Clearly some of the details of a future world are more plausible than others, but that doesn't matter because the book is about ideas and dilemmas, not the specific technologies that give rise to them.

Read it once for the plot, and read it again to get full value from the powerful issues within.

NB Review to be updated and lengthened soon. [Oops. Missed that boat!]

See also BNW Revisited:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

Huxley was heavily inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WE, which I prefer. See my review HERE.

In the beginning there was Henry Ford.

The Ford factory system designed vehicles that were fit for specific purposes, and this book starts off as a satire on applying that model to humanity. The problem then with traditional socialisation through the family and traditional education through schools is that it is haphazard. Hit and miss. As such it produces an unstable society with irregular, inconvenient needs, booms and busts, Wall Street Crashes and unemployment.

The initially unserious answer to all these problems that Huxley proposes is that you can have any colour you want so long as its black. Human society can, with a bit of chemistry, some growing of babies in jars and some judicious applications of electric shocks, be made into an ant colony. Each person fit for a purpose. The whole of society a factory designed to produce stability.

I think the Italian Futurists had similar ideas, it would have a fascist flavour but for the absence of nationalism, although in passing racism seems to exist - the hatchery produces colonial administrators - and the existence of the savage reservation is reminiscent of some later Nazi fantasies. Actually, are there any Alpha female characters? I only recall some who were Betas, so potentially equality of any kind has no place in Huxley's well ordered society of the future.

To start Huxley introduces some malcontented characters. Bernard Marx - who is inherently malcontented due to being shorter than he should be for his status and John Savage who is the child of Brave New World citizens, brought up on the Savage Reservation and not part of either society. Both of these characters have their limitations, and significantly Huxley chooses to have the Savage commit suicide rather than go off and found a new society. He is the archetypal traveller who insists on being unhappy in a foreign land because they don't make tea the same way they do at home. He is not like Lemuel Gulliver (or Marco Polo perhaps) and does not have the capacity to grow and learn from the places he visits.

Maybe Huxley's problem is that by the end of the book he finds his own model of stability too attractive. Certainly it is Mustapha Mond who emerges as the voice of wisdom in the final section of the book. He may not represent a perfect social system, but he is confident that the Brave New World delivers the Utilitarian ideal of the most pleasure to the greatest number of people and for those who are unhappy he is prepared to offer tailor made solutions. By this stage it is clear that what had originally been offered up as a satire - how absurd a society run on the principles of Henry Ford would be - has for Huxley become something reasonable, sensible and deeply seductive. Look, he says, it could work.

Arguably market forces are creating Brave New World as we sit here. The person on a high salary who farms out their children to private schools to coach them into the kind of job their parent has in which they feel obliged to work a lot, pay for a private trainer and go on manicured holidays to exotic but thoroughly manicured leisure experiences is already living the Brave New World Life - and they didn't even have to be grown in a jar.

That sense that it could work is the root of Brave New World's power as a book. 1984 is horrific, the image of a boot stamping on a human face for eternity, striking but the practical part of the head tells us that war is deeply stressful. Those three super states are going to be friable, run down, likely to struggle to feed and maintain a war effort (although I suppose the entire set up could be pure propaganda, we never see any fighting). In We, although I think better of it than Huxley's or Orwells dystopias) there is the problem of the outside world. Brave New World on the other hand, once you allow the science fantasy of the hatcheries, feels as though it could work. It feeds into a limited view of humans that we can be permanently satisfied through the appropriate mix of drugs, sex and crazy golf. Then again, there is Mustapha Mond able to provide an alternative for the seeker after self-actualisation, someone just like the reader.

As time went on, life mirroring art here, Huxley took to medicating himself against the human condition. What he started off as portraying in Brave New World as something comic became something meaningful and significant for him. It seems as though the man was swallowed by his own vision of a dystopian future. Seeing as he had poor eye sight I don't imagine that he enjoyed crazy golf much though.

As time went on as one can see clearly in Island Huxley discovered if not religion, then spirituality - his experiments with psychedelic substances may have played a role here - and it is interesting that his later Utopia for him is grown out of a strata of spirituality, while in Brave New World it is relegated to the reservation along with the other savage remnants of human societies - like Shakespeare. In short Huxley circles around the question of ideology. Brave New World has no ideology beyond consumerism, but man cannot live from bread alone, the economy may be stable, but the way of life necessary to facilitate that is inherently unsatisfactory, possible only through fetal alcohol poisoning and the careful terrorisation of toddlers.

By the 60s ,with Island Huxley has come up with a radically different solution. From a spiritual basis and addressing Malthus (who is at the root of most thinking about the future) through birth control, conservation and ecology he ends up with a humane society. The road to human flourishing, he says then, is possible only through respect and love for the rest of the universe.

I wanted to love this book, I really did. But, unfortunately, it did absolutely nothing for me, and in my opinion, the majority of this book was a mess. I struggled to honestly find anything significant to appreciate about it.
The book felt terribly slow, most of the way through, the characters were dull and flat, and, the dystopian setting was entirely unbelievable and unrealistic.
The writing style wasn't compelling, and I found it didn't flow with ease. I had much difficulty getting into this book, and really, if it wasn't for the fact of this being a classic, I may have given up reading it. Having not long finished this, I feel like the life has been sucked out of me!

n  n

I need to parse my rating of this book into the good (or great), the bad and the very fugly because I thought aspects of it were inspired genius and parts of it were dreggy, boring and living near the border of awful. In the end, the wowness and importance of the novel's ideas as well as the segments that I thoroughly enjoyed carried the book to a strong 3.5 star rating.

THE REALLY GOOD/EXCELLENT - I loved the first third of the book in which the basic outline of the "Brave New World" and its devalued, conveyer belt morality is set forth. The narrative device employed by Huxley of having the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning provide a walking tour to students around the facility as a way to knowledge up the reader on the societal basics was perfect. We learn of the cloning/birthing process, the caste system and the fundamental tenets upon which the society is organized.
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This was as good a use of infodumping exposition as I had come across in some time and I was impressed both with the content and delivery method. The reader gets a crash course in world and its history in a way that fit nicely into the flow of the narrative without ever feeling forced. This was easily the best part of the novel for me, and Huxley's mass production-based society of enforced hedonism and anti-emotion was very compelling. Sort of like...
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Now, long jumping to the end of the novel...

I also thought the final "debate" near the story's climax between John (the "savage") and Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, was exceptional. This last chapter/ending of the book, while abrupt, was masterful and struck the proper chord with the overall theme of the book.

Thus, a superior 4.5 to 5.0 stars for this portion of the book.

THE BAD/AWFUL - I thought the middle of the book including both the trip to the "reservation" and John's initial return to London was a sleeping pill and felt disconnected from the rest of the narrative. Throughout this entire portion of the book, all I kept thinking was...
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The only purpose of this long, long.....LONG section seems to be to allow the reader to see Bernard Marx do a complete 180 in his views on the society once he finds himself in the role of celebrity by virtue of his relationship with John the savage. Sorry, this just did not strike me as a big enough payoff for this dry, plodding section. It was a test of endurance to get through this portion of the book, so I'm being generous when I give it a weak 2.0 to 2.5 stars. I could just have easily summed it up by just saying...
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Bottom-line, I think this is a book that should be read. It's important book and there is much brilliance here. Plus, it is short enough that the stale boring segments aren't too tortuous to get through. However, as far as the triumvirate of classic dystopian science fiction goes...1984 is still the undisputed champ.

3.0 Stars. Recommended.

Um título irónico mas visionário para um livro publicado em 1932. Não somos nós em 2021 seres que enchemos os consultórios dos psiquiatras e esvaziamos as prateleiras das farmácias?
Uma geração medicada em busca de uma felicidade ilusória e dela dependente?

“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.”

When reading dystopian classics it’s sometimes difficult not to compare them with one another. I’m yet to read Zamyatin’s We, but I read Orwell’s 1984 a number of years ago and I was mostly expecting something of the same sort with Brave New World (though you could argue that Brave New World is a kind of utopia), as I hadn’t read anything about it beforehand. Turns out I was quite wrong.

Both books feature totalitarian systems, true. In 1984, the state controls the mind of its citizens. There’s Big Brother, thoughtcrime, newspeak and the Ministry of Love, which discourages human memory and promotes torture. In Brave New World things are quite different. Yes, there is a totalitarian state, but a much softer one, in which almost everything seems to be engineered. From controlling whole population’s characteristics, even before they are born, to hypnotised learning and promoting promiscuity (“everyone belongs to everyone else"). And there’s still “soma”, a drug which readily provides happiness and comfort.

Orwell wrote his book in the early days of the Cold War, when 1984 seemed to be the book that might get it right, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War maybe it’s Huxley’s Brave New World which might have taken the upper hand when it comes to predictions. This is true in at least most developed countries without an authoritarian state, while in these states certain parts of 1984 are still familiar. I wonder what the future might hold.

While 1984 explores the deprivation and lack of pleasure, Brave New World explores explores its promotion and excess. The societies represented in both books suffer from a loss of freedom. In addition, Brave New World also suffers from something else - a loss of responsibility. I always get the feeling that 1984 is the one totalitarian state which mostly everyone seems to fear, while Brave New World often doesn’t get into the discussion.

As a character from Brave New World says, "everybody is happy now". Considering the price to pay for happiness, is it really worth it?

Considering that this book was published in 1932, 90 years back, I was pleasantly surprised by how readable it is even today.

In the London of the future, society is carefully tailored into a well-thought-out structure for peaceful co-existence. Genetic engineering has made it possible to design & clone humans and there are categories based on their intellect and capabilities – Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas & Epsilons. It is pointed out that such a hierarchy is needed – an experiment with only Alphas failed miserably. Each of them is conditioned at birth to believe that they are lucky to be who they are. There is conditioning by reinforcement, sleep messaging and other methods. Henry Ford with his standard Model-T car is the biggest inspiration and phrases like “for Ford’s sake” are now commonplace. There is no classical childbirth anymore, the state oversees birth and religion, marriage and much of earlier literature is out. Everyone belongs to everyone. Interestingly, neuroscience today says that conditioning is very real, and all of us face it (refer Behave & How Emotions are Made). Soma is a drug everyone takes – which keeps people happy by dulling negative emotions, other than the systemic de-sensitization program in place.

Bernard is one of the doubters of some these methods, and Lenina is a curious sort who accompanies him on a trip to a ‘Savage Reservation’ in New England. There they come across John (referred to as the savage for the most part) and his mother, who was left back on a previous trip. They take them back to London, and it is especially a struggle for John. Lenina grows to like him but simply cannot understand his views and behaviour. For John, this mechanized living is hell. He longs for the full range of experiences and emotions the savage reservation provided.

The writing is somewhat understated in comparison to science fiction books I read today. I liked the characters of Bernard, Lenina & John (the savage). There is a lot to relate to as well. Avenues which provide ease, distraction and pleasure can be easily assumed to be true happiness. After all, that is what is on offer in gadgets, social media etc today and the distinction between pleasure and happiness is often lost. It is also interesting to contrast styles while covering similar themes of purpose, happiness & fulfilment in some of the newer science fiction work such as John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” series which I started on recently.

Overall, a read I loved.

My rating: 4.5 / 5.

Ford and Freud… Machinery and sexuality… These cosmic signs rule the world… Consumers and conformists constitute an ideal society…

Like aphides and ants, the leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons swarmed round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their places in the monorail tram-cars. Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went among the crowd. The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and departure of helicopters.

No more childbirths… Human beings are cloned in batches… Population is strictly divided into castes… Sexual promiscuity flourishes but love is unknown…
“Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!” William Shakespeare – The Tempest
One fine day, from the Mexican Reservation straight into the brave new world, the Savage is brought… In the total isolation, among the uncivilized natives, he thoroughly scrutinized The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and now, infected with the unhealthy poetic ideas, he falls in love… However, the old fiction turns out to be incongruous with the new reality.
Consumerism and conformity… It feels so much like today.