Paperback, 310 pages
English language
Published Nov. 7, 1956 by Modern Library.
Originally published in 1932, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before. Cloning, feel-good drugs, antiaging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media -- has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 AF (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, Brave New World is both a warning to be heeded and thought-provoking yet satisfying entertainment.
Read in and for English class in school. Would likely not have read it on an other occasion, although the themes and things discussed are thought provoking, I didn't really enjoy the book.
I guess it might be the point of the book, but I couldn't feel that any character was real, everything felt stereotypical; while at the same time that "prediction" of the future does not seem plausible to me.
And I repeat, it might be the point of the book, so, if that is the case, then great job. I just did not enjoy it or gained any interesting insight.
What we remember most is how disappointed we were that the story spun all the wonderful potential benefits of science into a dystopia where class and capitalism prevailed. The book disturbingly portrays how a society with admiral goals can go wrong with rigid and fanatical application. Society, it is to flourish, it needs to be open and alive.
I read Brave New World many years ago and decided to re-read it this year. I'd remembered the general storyline but most of the details so it felt fresh, and I'm glad I chose to go back to it because the perspective I have now in my life makes this book even more fascinating. There are layers of meaning in a book that is at once a commentary on our collective past and a disturbingly clear portend of our future. The peace-built-upon-rampant-consumerism setting is chilling in its likeness to where we already are (and where we seem to be headed) as a global society. It's well worth a re-read if you've not picked it up in a while.
There is much to be learned from reading this book and it is easy to forget that it was written early in the last century, not this one. Sadly, the warnings Huxley offers about what society was becoming were largely ignored and we've come to a society that so closely mirrors his "civilization" that it could have been a metaphor about our current state of affairs written by a contemporary author.
It is a very short novel but full of warnings and lessons that are as applicable, or even more so, today as they were in 1930. It is a lesson in mass manipulation by the media and big pharma. It is a lesson in treating people ultimately as mere resource rather than persons. And it is a lesson in extremes, extreme pain v. extreme pleasure and the wrongheadedness in submitting to either.
