Published in 1932 by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World portrays a futuristic society in which the individual is sacrificed for the state, science is used to control and subjugate, and all forms of art and history are outlawed. In short, the book fits into the classic mold of “dystopian” literature. (“Dystopia” is the opposite of utopia. In a dystopian society, everything is bad, and it’s generally the fault of government.).
While the novel has certainly been a success, it has also been criticized from many quarters. As a work of ideas and philosophy, it’s fascinating. As a work of imaginative fiction trying to be a novel…it actually fails, at least according to the tough critics. You’ll find that parts of the novel veer off into philosophical treatise land (Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen, in particular), the plot has some holes, and the characters have some major inconsistencies.
But if you step outside of the realm of the stuffiest of literary critics, you can appreciate the impact that Brave New World has made on 20th century literature with its dire warnings about the future. The novel is frequently compared to a much later novel, Orwell’s 1984, because the novels treat the same subject matter but in different light. In 1958, Huxley published an essay called Brave New World Revisited, in which he basically says, “I was right” and predicts that his horrifying vision of the future will come to fruition sooner rather than later.
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