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Brave New World (Paperback)
by Aldous Huxley
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Fiction, Sci-Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A radiant and dazzling novel that promises an intelligent and heartbreaking journey into the futuristic “Brave New World.” |
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Author: Aldous Huxley
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition
Pub. in: September, 1998
ISBN: 0060929871
Pages: 288
Measurements: 8.0 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00459
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An unlimited supply of state-sanctioned hallucinogenic drugs with no ill effects. Free sex, free contraceptives, and no relationships or commitments to worry about. No illnesses or unsightly aging. Unlimited access to recreation and games. A government committed to maintaining everyone's happiness. And this is a bad thing?
Actually, it is. For this is the Brave New World, set in A.F. 632 (approx 2644). While on its surface it may seem like some wild fantasy, the harsh reality of life in the World State is one where individualism has been extinguished long ago, along with religion, art, poetry, and philosophy. In its place is a materialistic, strictly controlled world where the New State (the totalitarian government) is in total control. Except for a few outposts of Savage settlements (such as the Native Americans), the new world is completely homogenized into one entity, whose citizens are divided into 5 distinct castes.
The most disturbing aspect of this society is the idea of "playing God." Humans are merely produced in an assembly line, set to mimic the uterine conditions of a fetus. Indeed, the assembly workers partake of various tasks, designed to condition the fetuses for their pre-destined castes. The lower castes are starved of oxygen and nutrition to make them inferior, while the Bokanovsky and Podsnap processes enable scores of human clones to be produced in rapid succession. Then, once they are decanted (born), they are "conditioned" (brainwashed) as children into accepting their status with happy abandonment.
Another disturbing element is the severing of all ties to the family and motherhood. The words "mother" and "viviparous" are considered obscenities of the worst degree. The "Savages," who still hold more traditional ideals of marriage and family are objects of ridicule and contempt.
The first part of the novel deals with the technology involved in this new world, while the second part details the exploits of John, a boy born of a World State mother while she is trapped in an Indian reservation. The moral conflict that John shows and the utter bewilderment of the World State denizens is striking. The idea that John's ideas of piety and pureness, ideas he ascertained from Shakespeare's works, are foreign and queer to the inhabitants of this new world. In fact, John is treated as a human oddity, yet he is easily the most human of all their inhabitants.
This book is a satire, so it lacks of the riveting suspense and tension of 1984. In fact, from a worldly and pragmatic view, the World State isn't that terrible. Even when dissenters are found who threaten the stability of the World State, they are merely exiled to a remote island, a far cry from the fate that befalls dissenters in 1984.
However, Brave New World still merits a read. It is entertaining and does show how de-humanizing the pursuit of worldly pleasures can be. The World State members are happy, but they are shallow shells of human beings who cannot think for themselves, love each other, or believe in a higher being.
To conclude, Brave New World is one of the definitive works of dystopian science-fiction, along with George Orwell's 1984, Ayn Rand's Anthem and Atlas Shrugged and Yevgeny Zamayatin's We. As with all classics of this sub-genre, Brave New World is fundamentally a cautionary tale warning us of what might happen should certain traits of our world grow to their logical extension. In 1984, it's a world where an authoritarian socialist police state dominates. In Atlas Shrugged, the world turns on the great men who produce for society. In Anthem and We, conformity has spread to the point of erasing all individual identity. Brave New World similarly explores these kinds of themes, but in a broader direction than other works. In his own distinctive style, Huxley creates a complete societal comparison of his "fictional" world and the one he lived in at the time.
(From quoting Sean K. and Joe Eagleson, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was born in Surrey, England, and is the author of many critically acclaimed books of fiction and nonfiction, including Crome Yellow, The Doors of Perception, and Island.
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From the Pubilisher:
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a classic science fiction work that continues to be a significant warning to our society today. "Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today - let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.
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| View all 8 comments |
Saturday Review of Literature (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers. |
Martin Green (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
It is as sparkling, provocative, as brilliant, in the appropriate sense, as impressive ads the day it was published. This is in part because its prophetic voice has remained surprisingly contemporary, both in its particular forecasts and in its general tone of semiserious alarm. But it is much more because the book succeeds as a work of art...This is surely Huxley's best book. |
Vivek Sharma (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Brave New World describes a paradigm for a new stable world, where arts are surpressed, faith and God are abolished, a caste system is created into which people are trained to think and work right from their births, sexual pleasures are promoted and "soma" present a ready refuge from every sorrow, every burst of adrelin. The novel written in 1930s is outright brilliant in several respects: its a self-supporting surprisingly accurate prophesy of changing world order and how societies are organized, it is book of reflection where the very basis of God, our faith, our social, religious and cultural attributes are questioned, it is a commentary on sociology, it is book of philosophy where questions about freewill, nature of science and most importantly human nature are provoked. The book is a great read, and one of those pieces of literature that everyone must commit to, not only to read it, but to think about what the book hints at! Huxley's Brave New World is in many respects like Wells’s Time Machine, underlines how luxury leads to lack of extremes, pain and instability which nucleate each change, drive new inventions and inspire art and literature. |
Russell Seidle (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
In his Foreword to Brave New World (written in 1946 for a reprinting of the novel originally released in 1931), Huxley admonishes himself for not having incorporated ideas associated with nuclear fission into the technologies of his imagined future society. Despite this omission, Brave New World undoubtedly remains an uncomfortably accurate depiction of tomorrow's world. One could argue - and argue convincingly - that Huxley's descriptions are more relevant now than at any time in the past.
Certainly, the unswerving emphasis on individual happiness, satiety, and immediate fulfillment of human desires described in the book more closely fits with current Western societal norms than it must have at the time of Huxley's writing. And while the notion of subconscious behavioural programming as a state-sanctioned institution may not have reached the explicit form characteristic of Huxley's world (there is as yet no formal College of Emotional Engineering, to my knowledge at least), it seems fair to say that corporations and governments exert all manner of subtle appeals for us to continue our patterns of conspicuous consumption and to content ourselves with the cultural, legal, and moral status quo. Like the inhabitants of the Brave New World, we are increasingly taught to despise yesterday's ideas and products, to self-medicate with all manner of mood-enhancing drugs (of the legal type only, of course), and to accept, however tactfully, established divisions between social classes.
Added to these general themes, the especially riveting aspects of Brave New World revolve around the adaptation - or lack thereof - of the Savage to the “civilized” society of the future. In the lengthy conversation between the Savage and Mustapha Mond, Huxley manages to deftly address principles of spirituality, art, and truth in ways that challenge us to surface and examine our own assumptions regarding the existing social order.
I found the treatment of religion and its place in future society to be of particular interest. The marginalization of Christian traditions and beliefs in this new world echoes the similar banishing of pagan systems by European settlers in early American history. What is more, by finding a place for the co-existence of these two religions in the “uncivilized” outpost of the Reservation, Huxley touches on the historical links between mysticism and mainstream Christianity, a theme he returns to in his excellent collection The Human Situation.
Apart from all this, though, Brave New World is also an engaging, well-crafted work in its own right, and can be enjoyed as a provocative novel without the need for excessive philosophizing of the type of which I'm guilty here. Well worth a read.
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