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Cover of Brave New World

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Summary

Brave New World is one of the most influential and powerful novels written in the twentieth century. It is one of the best known "dystopian" (implying "nightmare world") fictions alongside H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four . Huxley imagines a future world where children are processed genetically in bottles rather than conceived 'naturally', and belong to one of five classes according to their intelligence: from perfect "Alphas" down to moronic "Epsilons". Learning takes place by repetition teaching during sleep, but basically this consists of enforcing certain behaviour patterns through suggestion. This is backed up by the legal drug 'soma' that pacifies people through a false sense of fulfilment. The story is that of an unhappy Alpha-Plus man called Bernard Marx who is unusual for his genetic caste in being short and unorthodox in his ideas. He has fallen in love with a girl called Lenina, who he takes to an island of 'savages' where he meets a handsome young savage called John. This boy turns out to be the son of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning and Bernard manages to bring him back to 'civilization'. The story follows John as he is treated as a circus freak. John's desire for Lenina that is ruined by his antiquated notions of love that derive from Shakespeare . John becomes the focus of the novel as it leads towards its sad conclusion. This is as successful a cautionary tale now as it was at the time of its publication in 1932, and is just as popular.

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