This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
Towering classic of dystopian satire, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a brilliant and terrifying vision of a soulless society--and of one man who discovers the human costs of mindless conformity. Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene. Only Bernard Marx is discontented, developing an unnatural desire for solitude and a distaste for compulsory promiscuity. When he brings back a young man from one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old unenlightened ways still continue, he unleashes a dramatic clash of cultures that will force him to consider whether freedom, dignity, and individuality are worth suffering for.… (more)
zasmine: For Orwell was inspired by it. And Orwell's 1984 is as much of a prize as it.
li33ieg: 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451: 3 essential titles that remind us of the need to keep our individual souls pure.
Ludi_Ling: Really, the one cannot be mentioned without the other. Actually, apart from the dystopian subject matter, they are very different stories, but serve as a great counterpoint to one another.
Anonymous user: It's essential to read Huxley's and Orwell's books together. Both present the ultimate version of the totalitarian state, but there the similarities end. While Orwell argues in favour of hate and fear, Huxley suggests that pleasure and drugs would be far more effective as controlling forces. Who was the more prescient prophet? That's what every reader should decide for him- or herself.… (more)
artturnerjr: If you read only one other dystopian SF story, make it this one (well, you should read 1984, too, but you knew that already, didn't you?).
leigonj: Haldane's ideas of eugenics and ectogenesis, which are laid out alongside others including world government and psychoactive drugs, strongly influenced Huxley's novel.
fulner: Brave New world is a dystopian novel based on a world with too much enjoyment. Jennifer Government is a dystopian novel based on too much freedom.
In Orwell's 1984, it is sadness and hate that are the themes of the book - what with never-ending wars, children ratting out their parents for perceived treason, and nothing being sacred. Sprinkled with a plot which is amazing on its own merit, the result is a spectacular novel which is spellbinding. In extreme contrast comes Huxley with his magnum opus 'Brave New World' - where happiness and satisfaction form the lingering themes of the book - the result is surprisingly still a dystopia. The goal of pursuing happiness and satisfaction with Huxley's work, to the neglect of everything else, leads to a dystopia that functions on hypnopaedia (sleep conditioning so that no 'impure thoughts' develop), meaningless entertainment (responding to conditioned stimuli rather than your own subjective tastes), meaningless promiscuity (in fact, people trying to practice monogamy are outcasts), and a meaningless existence (supply and demand are both manufactured, and solitude is actively discouraged). The addition of a good plot would have made it a deserving classic - right now, it looks like I just read a postgraduate dissertation of an aspiring anthropologist. TL;DR - no less horrifying than Orwell's masterpiece, this is an extremely important read. For all the media screaming that our world is 1984, our world is much closer to Huxley's vision than we dare to think of. ( )
I think I understand why it's a classic and that has largely to do with the creativity of a book written in 1931. Huxley is clever and insightful. Why I didn't particularly care for it is that so much of the writing is way over the top...it's like a parody of itself. Just hilarious, without intending to be. Or only somewhat intending to be. Around 265 pages in (it's 310 pages long in my copy), Huxley gets down to a conversation that is the essence of the whole book and that's well done and pointed. The ending is also a bit more clever than I expected. But all things considered, a disappointment. ( )
Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu'on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante : comment éviter leur réalisation définitive ?… Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d'éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins 'parfaite' et plus libre. (—Nicholas Berdiaeff)
Dedication
First words
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.
Quotations
Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.
..."What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
"I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin ... I'm claiming the right to be unhappy". "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." ... "I claim them all".
"All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."
"No civilisation without social stability. No social stability without individual stability."
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those unnecessary old barriers.
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
It was the sort of idea that might make the higher castes believe that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.
The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.
Science is dangerous. It must be chained and muffled.
People believe in God because they have been conditioned to believe.
But everyone belongs to everyone else.
Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they ron’t respond properly to conditioning. (Henry)
I’d rather be unhappy than have the false, lying happiness you were having here.
Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.
But truth’s a menace, science is a public danger.
He would have liked to speak, but there were no words.
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin...
I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.
Towering classic of dystopian satire, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a brilliant and terrifying vision of a soulless society--and of one man who discovers the human costs of mindless conformity. Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene. Only Bernard Marx is discontented, developing an unnatural desire for solitude and a distaste for compulsory promiscuity. When he brings back a young man from one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old unenlightened ways still continue, he unleashes a dramatic clash of cultures that will force him to consider whether freedom, dignity, and individuality are worth suffering for.
▾Library descriptions
No library descriptions found.
▾LibraryThing members' description
Book description
Huxley's bleak future prophesized, in Brave New World was a capitalist civilization, which had been reconstituted through scientific and psychological engineering, a world in which people are genetically designed to be passive and useful to the ruling class. Huxley opens the book by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on the tour of the Fertilizing Room of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning center, where the high tech reproduction takes place. Bernard Marx (one of the characters in the story) seems alone, harboring an ill-defined longing to break free. Satirical and disturbing, Brave New World is set some 600 years into the future. Reproduction is controlled through genetic engineering, and people are bred into a rigid class system. As they mature, they are conditioned to be happy with the roles that society has created for them. Concepts such as family, freedom, love, and culture are considered grotesque.
Haiku summary
Legacy Library: Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
)
)
Google Books — Loading...
11
Wikipedia in English
