![]() Just in 2020, a new TV show was made, and every year, young adults read the book as part of their high school education. He went to the US in the Roaring 20’s, and the culture of consumerism, drugs, promiscuity, and partying scared him.Īs a result, Brave New World is an ambivalent book, open to many interpretations, and after selling millions of copies over nearly 100 years of being in print, the book is still being interpreted in new ways every day. Living in the extremely shaky political time that is the period between World War I and World War II, author Aldous Huxley was both drawn to the idea of stability (even to the point of sacrificing democracy) and terrified by what domination of any kind might bring. Unlike 1984, however, the people in Brave New World are slaves to pleasure, not pain. Published in 1932, Brave New World was decades ahead of its time, and of its sibling, 1984, the other of two defining works outlining what a modern dystopia could look like. He has a point - and if you read books like Brave New World, you’ll want to consume even less afterwards. ![]() “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books,” World Controller Mustapha Mond tells a group of children as they tour the “Hatchery and Conditioning Center” in London in the year 2540 AD. 1-Sentence-Summary: Brave New World presents a futuristic society engineered perfectly around capitalism and scientific efficiency, in which everyone is happy, conform, and content - but only at first glance. ‘A brilliant tour de force, Brave New World may be read as a grave warning of the pitfalls that await uncontrolled scientific advance. ![]() Also included is the author’s own 1946 preface – a source of insight into his evolving stance on the world he created. The winner, Finn Dean, was chosen for his striking style, which has a futuristic feel reminiscent of Art Deco patterns and shapes. In her introduction, she writes that: ‘Huxley was brilliant in his paradoxical depiction of a perfect heaven which is a perfect hell.’ This Folio edition was the subject of the 2013 Book Illustration Competition, run in association with the House of Illustration. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Le Guin’s acclaimed body of work includes 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories and 12 books for children. His retreat from and subsequent clash with the world he has rejected bring to a hideous conclusion the conflict between perpetual happiness and free will. Though initially intrigued, John is soon horrified by the synthesised, godless happiness of his ‘civilised’ counterparts. Returning from a tourist trip to a Mexican Reservation – one of the resource-poor areas of the Earth deemed unworthy of ‘civilisation’ – and anxious to raise his image, he introduces a Shakespeare-quoting ‘savage’, John, to the ‘Brave New World’. ![]() Only occasionally does the process fail, as with Bernard Marx, a miserably insecure ‘Alpha-Plus’ who lacks the physical stature that should accompany his high IQ. Unpleasant feelings are swiftly aborted by a voluntary hit of soma, a wonder drug that provides a ‘holiday’ from consciousness, sustaining the contented inertia that preserves world stability. There are no familial ties, and promiscuity is obligatory. Desires are immediately fulfilled: ‘You can’t have a lasting civilisation without plenty of pleasant vices,’ says one of the ten local World Controllers, Mustapha Mond. A rigid caste system is blithely accepted by all, from Epsilon Semi-Moron factory workers to scientists at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. (‘After Ford’), it describes a new ‘World State’ in which human clones, conditioned through hypnopaedia to perpetually inhabit ‘an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations’, support a meticulously controlled system of consumption and production. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. ![]()
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