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"Brave New World"

(York Notes Advanced)

By Aldous Huxley

(794)

| Paperback | 9781405801713

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Critics

Prophet of our present

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual Nicholas Murray 496pp, Little, Brown, £20 Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th- century novelist. Even his casual asides have a surprising relevance to our ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

Aldous and his women

Aldous Huxley Nicholas Murray Little, Brown £20, pp496 Nicholas Murray faces two frustrations as a biographer of Aldous Huxley. One, paradoxically, is that Huxley was a conscientious archivist who kept, for instance, the love letters exchanged with h ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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28 Reviews

6 people find this helpful

A brilliant work

This sci-fi work is set in an utopian future of Earth in the 26th century.
Family as an entity no longer exists. All babies are decanted artificially by fusing ovules and sperms and growing them. Eugenics is used to create 5 castes of humans known as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, rang ... (continue)

This sci-fi work is set in an utopian future of Earth in the 26th century.
Family as an entity no longer exists. All babies are decanted artificially by fusing ovules and sperms and growing them. Eugenics is used to create 5 castes of humans known as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, ranging respectively from intelligent beings to morons. Each class is imbibed with the characteristics required for their future work by conditioning them (thinking for the Alphas, manual labour for the Epsilons and so on). Hypnopædia (sleep-learning) is extensively used while rearing children to ensure that they think in a predestined way all their life. Since they're all artificially grown, the concept of parents or siblings doesn't exist. Every person is a cell in the social body. Everyone takes artificial agents to ensure youthful beauty until their dying breath. Everyone belongs to everyone else, i.e. sex is promiscuous. Living with a single person for life is unheard of. There are no politics, war, family, literature or religions. Soma (a drug) is used by everyone to stay blissful all day. Everyone is happy.
In this world is Bernard Marx, an Alpha who is dating a beautiful Beta named Lenina. He is tired of the artificial life and takes her on a trip to a savage reservation in New Mexico. These are inhospitable parts of the planet where uncivilized people have been allowed to stay as they had centuries ago. Here, Marx runs into a savage child named John, who is actually a child of a civilized mom. He takes him back to London. Meanwhile, Lenina is feeling love towards this savage. In the New World, John observes how his life in the forests differs so much from the controlled life in London. He has feelings towards Lenina too, but is turned off by her behaviour. Everything comes to a head when he causes a ruckus at a hospital. He is taken to meet Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller (think Architect from Matrix Reloaded) along with Marx and his fellow thinker Helmholtz. In his office, John and Mond confront each other and it leads to an enthralling discussion about the gains and losses by living like they are in this controlled artificial society. In the end, Marx and Helmholtz are transferred to distant islands and John moves back to a solitary life in the wild.
Written in 1932, Brave New World is a surprisingly good read even today. (The book is available online.) The pace is quick, the flavour is light. Huxley is brilliant in recreating his utopian world. The book can be roughly divided into 3 parts. The 1st introduces the new world in rich detail. The 2nd introduces the protagonists and the last part deals with the debate between Mond and John. The last part is what makes delightful reading. The reader finally learns how this world came to be, how humanity slowly gave up its freedom in exchange for happiness. This is a thrilling and brilliant work filled with ideas. Recommended.

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Ashwin Nanjappa said on Jun 26, 2007 | Add your feedback

2 people find this helpful

"[...]As if one believed anything by instict! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God."

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Dimitja said on Mar 21, 2011 | Add your feedback

2 people find this helpful

another take on a dystopia that I found far more disturbing than "1984."

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M Lawrence Key said on Dec 3, 2008 | Add your feedback

Truly smart

The smartest book I've read in a lot of time: I expected something like 1984 -good, but not excellent-, but I found a masterpiece. Written in 1932, it talks about genetics, about the most interesting topics -politics, science, religion, even sex (and very bravely)-, about the fight between ha ... (continue)

The smartest book I've read in a lot of time: I expected something like 1984 -good, but not excellent-, but I found a masterpiece. Written in 1932, it talks about genetics, about the most interesting topics -politics, science, religion, even sex (and very bravely)-, about the fight between happiness and knowledge, but most importantly: it talks about freedom. This satire will become more and more accurate as years go on. Brilliant.

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Juan Ángel said on Mar 9, 2012 | Add your feedback

" the world's stable now. people are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. "

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kovalski said on Dec 29, 2011 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

This is a must to read.
It is unbelievable that it was written in 1931. Huxley creates a dystopian fictional world using all the political and social issues of his time and anticipating all the future ones

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Barbara ABP said on Apr 30, 2011 about the Others edition | Add your feedback