Buy used: $5.00

$3.99 delivery Friday, March 17. Details

Used: Acceptable | Details

Sold by jenzbookbiz

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Authors

Aldous Huxley

John Sutherland

Brave New World Reprint Edition

by Aldous Huxley (Author)

31,904 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$1.62

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover, Deckle Edge

"Please retry"

$17.89

$16.09

$9.99

Hardcover, September 24, 2013

$5.00

$36.35

$5.00

Paperback, Deckle Edge

"Please retry"

$11.29

$3.84

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

$7.85

$69.45

$4.00

MP3 CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$14.91

$15.00

Now a television series by the creators of The Walking Dead!

Ranked one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, this dystopian satire 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.

Aldous Huxley’s ingenious fantasy of a future of mechanical efficiency and engineered harmony has been enormously influential for generations, and is as provocative, powerful, and riveting as when it was first published in 1932.

ISBN-10

0375712364
ISBN-13

978-0375712364
Edition

Reprint
Publisher

Everyman's Library
Publication date

January 1, 2013
Language

English
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
Print length

280 pages
See all details

George Orwell
85,057
Mass Market Paperback
293 offers from $1.89
Ray Bradbury
41,979
Paperback
299 offers from $2.01
George Orwell
51,080
Mass Market Paperback
Teachers' pick
259 offers from $1.15
Aldous Huxley
1,989
Paperback
134 offers from $2.34
Aldous Huxley
3,699
Paperback
90 offers from $7.18
Aldous Huxley
1,848
Paperback
94 offers from $3.61

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A brilliant tour de force . . . Full of barbed wit and malice-spiked frankness . . . Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling.” —THE OBSERVER

“Ingenious wit, derisive logic and swiftness of expression . . . Huxley’s resources of sardonic invention have never been more brilliantly displayed.” —THE TIMES (LONDON)

“The Utopia to end Utopias.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES

“An exuberant playground for ideas . . . Brave New World (like Nineteen Eighty-Four) is a novel part of whose instinctive horror is generated by the fact that it foresees a world where novels are no longer possible . . . Brave New World presents itself as a measure of what would be lost in the brave new world of AF 632. No more novels, no more Huxleys. A darker than dark age is coming . . . In the meanwhile Brave New World remains the most readable of grumpy dystopias.”
—from the Introduction by John Sutherland

About the Author

ALDOUS HUXLEY, born in 1894, wrote some of the most famous and enduring books of the twentieth century. His works include the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as the nonfiction volumes The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. He died in Los Angeles in 1963.

About the Introducer: JOHN SUTHERLAND is the author of seventeen books on literature and language, a regular columnist for The Guardian, and an emeritus professor at University College, London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from the Introduction

INTRODUCTION
____

"With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about? Too much happiness."

(Disgruntled reviewer of Brave New World )

Brave New World is not strictly a novel of ideas in terms of Philip Quarles’s much-quoted definition in Huxley’s Point Counter Point: ‘the character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is a mouthpiece’. As in much satire and science fiction, the characters in Brave New World have little ‘character’, as such. But the novel is an exuberant playground for ideas, the bulk of them dropped in raw from the author’s recent, voracious, reading. Brave New World is also a prime vindication of the veteran science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss’s argument that his genre is rarely ‘prophetic’ – a forecast (accurate or inaccurate) of the future. It is, typically, Aldiss argues, ‘prodromic’.2 That is, SF and dys/u/topian fiction is symptomatic of the present in which it is written. Or, to put it equationally, 1984 = 1948 And Huxley’s novel is similarly more concerned with AD 1932 than far-off AF 632, when the action of Brave New World is ostensibly set. It was, in its day, a novel of the day.

Brave New World is also a highly argumentative novel. Throughout Huxley picks intellectual fights. Three of the fights are central:

1. Huxley versus Henry Ford
2. Huxley versus D. H. Lawrence
3. Huxley versus ‘the Jazz Age’

First, what literary debts does Huxley owe? There are many but the only one he acknowledged was to H. G. Wells whose Men Like Gods (1923) Brave New World specifically controverts (or whose ‘leg it pulls’, as he put it).3 Huxley objected to the conflictless nature of Wells’s utopia, inhabited as it exclusively was by Aò specimens of humanity. But despite his proclaimed differences with Wells, Huxley took over from the other author the idea of the supranational world state and its Controllers’ Council (both writers were inspired by the recently set up League of Nations). It was very much a vision of the time and the time’s thinkers were in two minds as to whether superstates were a good thing or not. We’re still in two minds (viz. the recent fierce pro-and-con ‘debates’, currently raging as I write, over the European Union).

In an essay in Tribune in January 1946, George Orwell inferred that Huxley ‘must have come into contact (presumably via French translation) with Yevgeni Zamyatin’s anti-Soviet-totalitarian We (Nous Autres)’. This source seems unlikely, or not as important as Orwell thought (he was currently meditating Nineteen Eighty-Four which is very derivative of We). Brave New World’s strongest pedigree line seems to ascend via Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910) to the nineteenth-century socialist fables of Edward Bellamy and William Morris. But Huxley was strongly antipathetic to the politics of Fabian utopianists like Wells and George Bernard Shaw (‘one of the very few writers whose works have been permitted to come down to us’, as the D.H.C. (Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning) piously notes in Brave New World). He was equally opposed to what Daniel Kevles has called ‘Reform Eugenics’5 – those who believed that society could be improved by human breeding programmes. But Huxley nevertheless borrowed plot devices from all his opponents. Call it eclecticism.6 No novel carries the sign ‘plot-lifters will be prosecuted’. Huxley is a great pilferer. Forgivable because he invariably improves what he pilfers.

A number of commentators have noted Huxley’s manifest indebtedness in Brave New World to Bertrand Russell’s popular treatise, The Scientific Outlook (1931) which was published almost exactly at the moment Huxley began writing (his biographer, Sybille Bedford, records that he began work on Brave New World in April 1931 and completed it between May and August of that year). Philip Thody, in a jaundiced review, asserted that ‘so much of Brave New World resembles The Scientific Outlook that one wonders at times if Huxley put any original ideas at all into the book’.

Thody is too hard. But Huxley clearly plundered Chapter 15 of Russell’s book, ‘Education in a Scientific Age’. Russell here departs from his expository mode (he was an incorrigible pontificator) to try his arm at a satirical prophecy about the socially engineered and class stratified society of the scientifically managed future. Children, he predicts, will be conditioned ‘some time before birth’ (by ‘thermal treatment of the embryo’) for their station in life. Manual workers (like Huxley’s Epsilons) ‘will be discouraged from serious thought and in general will be bred for patience and muscle rather than brain’. The society of the scientific future will be tranquillized by ‘new forms of drunkenness’ (i.e. ‘Soma’ in Brave New World ).8 The only problem in this perfect world state will be ‘the psychology of the governors’ (i.e. disruptive Alpha-pluses, like Bernard Marx in Brave New World ).

If there were patent-protection in fictional scenarios any lawyer would have taken Russell’s case. The whole framework of Brave New World is to be found in the fifteenth chapter of The Scientific Outlook. But the two writers’ conclusions are strikingly different. Huxley’s narrative ends with the demonstration of the scientific state’s invincibility. John Savage is dead. Helmholtz and Bernard are banished to where they can do no harm. Russell – having mischievously sketched out his scientific utopia – concludes that it would ultimately be destroyed by its own repressed libido and humanity’s invincible irrationality.

HUXLEY VERSUS HENRY FORD

The epigraph to Brave New World is taken from the Russian religious philosopher Nicolas Berdiaeff and his assertion that ‘les utopies sont re ́alisables’. Utopia, in other (English) words, is nigh.9 Other fabulists were more telescopic in their visions. Social perfection, for them, was far from nigh. Bernard Shaw, for instance, in Back to Methuselah (1921) conceived of human apotheosis – but some thirty million years in the future. In Last and First Men (1930) Olaf Stapledon foresees the end of evolution some two billion years hence. By contrast Brave New World is set in ‘AF’ (i.e. ‘After Ford’) 632. Given Henry Ford’s birth in 1863 this means a narrative time setting of AD 2495 – virtually the day after tomorrow in SF’s cosmic chronologies.

At the leviathan level of global-scientific organization there are two principal tools used by the masters in Brave New World. The most powerful is ‘Control’, as opposed to ‘Government’. At this period of his life Huxley was a student and disciple of Pareto’s General Sociology. He pays glowing tribute to the philosopher in the preface to Proper Studies (1927), the only thorough and extended exercise in social theory he ever wrote (in it he says, ‘the author to whom I owe the most is Vilfredo Pareto’). In Pareto’s model the state eventually comes to be ruled not by ‘lions’ – dictators, that is, possessed of brute force – but by ‘foxes’. Foxes operate by secret manipulation and guile. They are men without idealism, or ideology, interested only in management. Keeping the show on the road.

Brave New World is run by ten such ‘World Controllers’. Their rule, as evident in the final judgements on John Savage, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, is cynical but benign in a vulpine kind of way. They use their principal instruments of control – ectogenesis (babies bred in bottles), hypnopaedia (sleep teaching), Pavlovian conditioning, tranquillizing Soma – for the good of the population as the Controllers conceive that good.
Like many European intellectuals of the day (notably Shaw), Huxley in 1931 attributed epic historical significance to Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, as the manifestation in political action of Pareto’s theory. In Brave New World, for all their faults, the World Controllers contrive to keep the intercontinental passenger rockets running on time, as Il Duce reputedly did the Italian trains.

The second tool for social control in Huxley’s dystopia is the universal application of the principles of ‘Fordism’. Whereas the workings of Pareto’s pervasive management machine are necessarily hidden from the duped subjects of Brave New World (who perceive only a ‘natural’ state of things, based on the proverbial ‘common sense’ they absorb hypnopaedically at night), Ford (‘Good Ford!’) has been elevated to the status of a deity. His My Life and Work (1922) is (hilariously) a biblical text. ‘T’ is as sacred a sign as the cross was two millennia ago.

By means of the Pareto and Ford apparatus, and with an ensemble of practical techniques furnished by modern science, a great stasis is envisaged in Brave New World. The biological motor of evolution has been stilled. And, at the level of human organization, democracy has been similarly ‘turned off’. The state, the nation, the individual have withered and been replaced by the benevolent assembly line, which imposes its own caste hierarchy, yields surplus value (‘comfort’ in Huxley’s lexicon), creates consumers for its products, absorbs energy without exhaustion. It is a system sans entropy. Time, to borrow another of Huxley’s titles, has found its stop.

Brave New World opens with a twisted Genesis, a trip conducted by its Director round the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre in Bloomsbury. (The choice of site is sly, given the Bloomsburyites’ – Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, et al. – skittishness about physical sex.) In terms of narrative this opening is a fairly crude expository device (the tour d’horizon) of the kind ‘new world’ fiction is routinely obliged to resort to. But Huxley is an agile narrator and his precious tone (half Stracheyan belletrist, half Woolfian stream of consciousness)11 disdains by manner the barbarism it describes.

Commentators have suggested that Huxley is indebted for the ectogenesis gimmick (‘babies in bottles’) to J. B. S. Haldane and his essay-cum-fable Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) Huxley, however, can claim priority for the idea. As early as 1922, in Crome Yellow, Mr Scogan outlines his vision of the future ‘Rational State’ in which mankind will be procreated from ‘gravid bottles’ in state incubators.

Huxley, whose mind was magnetically drawn to grand syntheses, combines a whole bundle of other innovatory techniques in his depiction of the future ‘educational’ (i.e. ‘control’) system. In vitro, the foetus, according to its grade, is subjected to ‘hard’ x-rays to retard or damage its development. Radiation-induced gene-mutation by the controlled application of x-rays was first demonstrated by Herman Müller in 1927. Huxley’s ‘Bokanovsky’ budding (i.e. cloning) process is a literary invention (at the time) as is the slyly named ‘Podsnap technique’ (after Dickens’s arch-hypocrite).

Once born, Brave New World infants are ‘conditioned’ on neo-Pavlovian lines, so as to fit the predestined roles society has planned for them. Mothers and fathers are obscene anachronisms. Huxley alludes, here, to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education (1917–29) and his programme to replace the ‘bourgeois’ family by the modern Soviet state. More directly, Huxley took his ideas about conditioning from the American J. B. Watson’s Behaviorism (1924, revised 1930). Watson’s confidence in his power to predestine children is scarcely exaggerated by Huxley’s satire. ‘Give me a dozen healthy children’, Watson wrote, ‘well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up in’:

and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief – regardless of his talents, penchants, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Youngsters in Brave New World are ‘taught’ largely by hypnopaedia, an idea which Huxley took from Pavlov’s writings on the subject. The notion of sleep-learning, the nocturnal voice in the sleeping ear, is elegantly at home in Brave New World, combining as it does passive consumerism with subliminal control.

In their daylight school-time the children of Brave New World indulge in de-repressive sexual play. We encounter them doing this in the chaste surroundings of what Huxley’s contemporaries would have recognized as Coram’s Fields – the best known children’s refuge in London (adults are not allowed in unless, as the signs say, ‘accompanied by a child’). Huxley had in mind Bertrand Russell’s scandalous Beacon Hill school, founded in 1927. As R. W. Clark recalls in his biography of Russell (1976):

The sexual freedom of the school was a subject of constant prurient amazement. The children were allowed to remove all their clothes in the summer if they wished to, especially for outdoor dancing and exercise. Special sex instruction was never required, since fundamentals were incorporated in biology lessons.

Compare the opening of Chapter 3 of Brave New World:

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The flaw in Huxley’s vision in Brave New World is the consolidation he assumes between eugenics, obstetrics, psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, biology, pedagogy and so on. The tendency of scientific thought is schismatic and self-protectively compartmental. It is not collaborative by instinct; just the opposite. Pavlovians, Fordians, and Freudians are as likely to join forces as lions and lambs to lie down together. In the Hatchery, the eugenists work in the basement and their ‘colleagues’ upstairs do the conditioning, in an atmosphere of harmony. In the real world Watson’s theory of Behaviourism was polemically directed against the hated heresies of the eugenists. He would no more have teamed up with them, as happens in Brave New World, than he would have joined up with a circus hypnotist. The totalitarianism which Huxley depicts depends on a wholly improbable alliance of scientific schools and disciplines. What it reflects is less the future of civilization than the extraordinarily jackdaw quality of Huxley’s mind.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Everyman's Library; Reprint edition (January 1, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375712364
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375712364
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13+ years, from customers
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches

Customer Reviews:
31,904 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Aldous Huxley
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles.
See more on the author's page
John Sutherland
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

31,904 global ratings

5 star		73%
4 star		15%
3 star		7%
2 star		2%
1 star		3%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Ashutosh S. Jogalekar

Fine-tuning the future

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

Before there was ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Bladerunner’, before there was even ‘1984’, there was 'Brave New World'. It is astonishing that Aldous Huxley wrote this tale of technological dystopia in 1932. The social elements from the story are similar to those in Orwell and Kafka and others, namely a society of obedient sheep run by the state and benevolent dictators through brainwashing and groupthink. But what’s striking about the novel is how it so astutely anticipates a society taken over by benevolent technocrats rather than politicians, a scenario that appears increasingly likely in the age of AI and genetic engineering.

Huxley came from an illustrious scientific family with social connections. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s close friend, publicist and “bulldog”, whose famous smackdown of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce has been relished by rationalists fighting against religious faith ever since. His brother was Julian Huxley, a famous biologist who among other accomplishments wrote a marvelous tome on everything that was then known about biology with H. G. Wells. Steeped in scientific as well as social discourse, possessing a deep knowledge of medical and other scientific research, Aldous was in an ideal position to write a far-reaching novel.

This he duly did. The basic premise of the novel sounds eerily prescient. Sometime in the near future, society has been regimented into a caste system where people are genetically engineered by the state in large state-run reproductive farms. Anticipating ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, only a select few women and men are capable of providing fertile eggs and sperm for this careful social engineering. The higher castes are strong, intelligent and charismatic. The lower castes are turgid, obedient and physically weak. They don’t begrudge those from the upper castes because their genetic engineering has largely removed their propensity toward jealousy and violence. Most notably, because reproduction is now the responsibility of the state, there is no longer a concept of a family, of a father or mother. There is knowledge of these concepts, but it’s regarded as archaic history from a past era and is met with revulsion.

How is this population kept under control? Not shockingly at all, through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Promiscuity is encouraged from childhood onwards and is simply a way of life, and everyone sleeps with everyone else, again without feeling jealousy or resentment (it was this depiction of promiscuity that led the book to be banned in India in the 60s). They flood their bodies with a drug called soma whenever they feel any kind of negative emotion welling up inside and party like there’s no end. They are brainwashed into believing the virtues of these and other interventions by the state through subliminal messages played when they are sleeping; such unconscious brainwashing goes all the way back to their birth. People do die, but out of sight, and when they are still looking young and attractive. Death is little more than a nuisance, a slight distraction from youth, beauty and fun.

Like Neo from ‘The Matrix’, one particular citizen of this society named Bernard Marx starts feeling that there is more to the world than would be apparent from this state of induced bliss. On a tryst with a particularly attractive member of his caste in an Indian reservation in New Mexico, he comes across a man referred to as the savage. The savage is the product of an illegitimate encounter (back when there were parents) between a member of a lower caste and the Director of Hatcheries who oversees all the controlled reproduction. He has grown up without any of the enlightened instruments of the New World, but his mother has kept a copy of Shakespeare with her so he knows all of Shakespeare by heart and frequently quotes it. Marx brings the savage back to his society. The rest of the book describes the savage’s reaction to this supposed utopia and its ultimately tragic consequences. Ultimately he concludes that it’s better to have free will and feel occasionally unhappy, resentful and angry than live in a society where free will is squelched and the population is kept bathed in an induced state of artificial happiness.

The vision of technological control in the novel is sweeping and frighteningly prescient. There is the brainwashing and complacent submission to the status quo that everyone undergoes which is similar to the messages provided in modern times by TV, social media and the 24-hour news cycle. There are the chemical and genetic interventions made by the state right in the embryonic stage to make sure that the embryos grow up with desired physical or mental advantages or deficiencies. These kinds of interventions are the exact kind feared by those wary of CRISPR and other genetic editing technologies. Finally, keeping the population preoccupied, entertained and away from critical thinking through sex and promiscuity is a particularly potent form of societal control that has been appreciated well by Victoria’s Secret, and that will not end with developments in virtual reality.

In some sense, Huxley completely anticipates the social problems engendered by the technological takeover of human jobs by robots and AI. Once human beings are left with nothing to do, how does the state ensure that they are prevented from becoming bored and restless and causing all kinds of trouble? In his book “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari asks the same questions and concludes that a technocratic society will come up with distractions like virtual reality video games, new psychoactive drugs and novel forms of sexual entertainment that will keep the vast majority of unemployed from becoming bored and potentially hostile. I do not know whether Harari read Huxley, but I do feel more frightened by Huxley than by Harari. One reason I feel more frightened is because of what he leaves out; the book was published in 1932, so it omits any discussion of nuclear weapons which were invented ten years later. The combination of nuclear weapons with limitless societal control through technology makes for a particularly combustible mix.

The biggest prediction of Huxley’s dystopia, and one distinctly different from that made by Orwell or Kafka, is that instead of a socialist state, people’s minds are much more likely to be controlled in the near future by the leaders of technology companies like Google and Facebook who have formed an unholy nexus with the government. With their social media alerts and Fitbits and maps, the tech companies are increasingly telling us how to live our lives and distracting us from free thinking. Instead of communist regimes like the Soviet Union forcibly trampling on individual choice and liberty, we are already gently but willingly ceding our choices, privacy and liberties to machines and algorithms developed by these companies. And just like the state in Huxley and Orwell’s works, the leaders of these corporations will tell us why it’s in our best interests to let technology control our lives and freedom, when all the while it would really be in their best interests to tell us this. Our capitulation to their inventions will look helpful and voluntary and will feel pleasurable and even noble, but it will be no less complete than the capitulation of every individual in “Brave New World” or “1984”. The only question is, will there be any savages left among us to tell us how foolishly we are behaving?

854 people found this helpful

Helpful

will5967

Love Is the Drug - Or at Least, It Should Be

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 28, 2015

Verified Purchase

Curious, that it's probably the latter half of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that gives the book such intellectual immortality and literary distinction. At least the first third, in fact, struck me as being disjointed, random, and almost reckless and willynilly in what, at the onset, seems almost pointless in its contrived weirdness.

While at first struggling to make it through to the real meat and potatoes of Huxley's magnum opus, I was even reminded of having once known an extremely frustrated friend from a previous job, who was a college student at the time, who was being forced (okay, "assigned" - your word for societal conditioning here, as you please, of course) to read Brave New World, and with the turn of almost every page, while slogging methodically through every colorful (though usually bizarre) catchphrase that the author uses to more fully illustrate his version of a totally pacifistic, impotent and pacified (drugged, stoned, rendered mute AND moot) futuristic human populace, the odd recollection of my tortured young student friend just kept coming back to me, time and time again.

"Viviparous." My young friend kept repeating whenever possible, at work. "Do you know what it means?" His instructor was MAKING him read the damn book, he lamented, and just getting through the first few chapters was giving him something suspiciously close to a nervous breakdown. And I must confess, at the time, I was quite mystified, not so much by the word "viviparous" itself (because like all avid readers, I positively love to learn new vocabulary), but the fact that his assigned reading was vexing his struggling, scholastic mind with such profound, torturous ardor.

I'd seen the first telefilm adaptation of BNW as a kid, of course, but simply had no true sense of the depths of my friend's affliction with having to wrap his bewildered mind around the dystopian world of Huxley's imagining, until years later, when I undertook my own journey into the untamed, almost flighty wilderness of the hallucinogenic laced dream-scape presented in the book.

Thankfully, however, I soon found, that if you stick with it, that perplexing Brave New World starts to gradually make a great deal more sense - despite all its artful senselessness and carefully contrived absurdity, that is. But the author never fails to do what all the best writers throughout history have always done. They make you THINK, while (in Huxley's case, anyway) still confounding you with their own seeming inability to practice what they so eloquently preach.

So... Brave New World's about the danger that society will one day become so hyper controlled, overly parented (via excessive government interference - thereby making parenthood obsolete and even obscene), sterile, docile and impotent, that humanity cannot help but be reduced to a herd of genetically engineered, assembly line produced cattle. And the author was himself an avowed pacifist. Not that there's anything wrong with THAT, of course. And given that Huxley's highly ordered future certainly isn't what you'd call warlike, he's at least consistent in that regard. But in one other important respect, the contrast between his fiction and his reality seems positively schizophrenic.

Take soma, for example (but for goodness sake, hopefully not literally), Huxley's cure all super-drug of the perpetually stoned masses of the "happy" future. The author's got you convinced that its all a bad, bad, bad idea for mankind, until... you read that the dude was into psychedelic substances himself! Like... WHAT? That's almost like Charles Manson brainwashing a few handpicked followers to commit random murders in the hopes of inciting a race war, simply because he believes its gonna eventually happen anyway! And Huxley really does give us the blueprint for a truly dystopian future does he not?

Helter Skelter! But Charles Manson wasn't even born when Huxley was writing the book, and "race" certainly doesn't seem to be a problem any longer in his Brave New World of the far flung future. But classicism? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.

So then... which Aldous Huxley are we to ultimately put our faith in? The one who so eloquently tells it like it really is (or rather, the way it could be, if we're not extra careful) within the pages of his most highly touted masterpiece, or the guy who took his own share of mind altering substances, and during his own lifetime, did more than most, to lay out the Marxist-esque prototype of the hippie commune, free loving, drugged up 1960s carefree lifestyle, several decades before it got to be counterculture cool?

But let's keep in mind, shall we, that both Huxley and the hippie movement died in the sixties. The author died quite literally on November 22, 1963, of advanced laryngeal cancer, with his passing being aided by a couple doses of "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular," helpfully administered by his wife. The counterculture movement of course went on well into the early seventies, but many scholars argue that its real death knell was sounded on the night of August 8-9, 1969, when Charles Manson's "family" murdered eight month pregnant actress Sharon Tate, her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, and three unfortunate others. Two more murders were committed the following night, and whether the free love loving, "soma" sucking hippies yet knew it or not, the Brave New World would soon be essentially over.

What a magnificent head trip this Brave New World of Aldous Huxley's far flung, far out, dream-questing, melodramatic, prophetic future! What a delightful mental brain-freeze for soma laced ice cream lovers of all generations, past, present, and still, perhaps most frighteningly, yet to come! For let us not forget that so very much of what makes this masterfully told masterwork so fearfully effective, is that so much of it has already, and still continues to cyclically come to pass, in one way or another. So, color me "the savage," I suppose. I'll take my Shakespeare and good old fashioned reality injected pain to my earthly grave, thank you very much. So like this review, lump it, or leave it, as you wish, I suppose. And by all means, have my share of soma if you so choose. While "modern" society still affords you the luxury of free will, that is. Like the poor savage, I don't really need your permission or approval either.

18 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Jo Jo

Brilliant!!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

Quite depressing but so timely accurate. Everyone should read it - together with 1984 - G. Orwell.

80 people found this helpful

YvonneB

A world where people are engineered to fit into society

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 7, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is a book that I have been wanting to read for years but never got to it. I finally decided to give it a go. I was only aware of the basics of this book and I hadn't read any other reviews about it.

What I discovered is quite a bizarre story that became quite addictive. It does have a strong literary fiction feel to it. At times the writing is poetic, at others disjointed and overall a story that gradually got under my skin.

The world that Huxley has created is one where people are expected to be happy, they are brainwashed into feeling this. There is no mother, father or in fact any type of family connection. Each person has been produced in a test tube, each person has been altered at a genetic level to become what is required for Huxley's world to function. There is a layered social system where people are born to be what they are engineered to be, so someone with a lowly job will be content with that job. They don't aspire to be anything more than what they are supposed to be.

Creating this world, the author then throws an anomaly in the system, this is something that shows that even with the use of technology there will be a time when nature intervenes, or it may be a simple human mistake. Either way, this is where the characters that start to question the system have a more important role.

In the second half of the book, there is a move from the system to that of the outside world, this is more what we know today. Parents, relationships and unique traits and characteristics. This for me is where the story then takes an even more addictive turn. The comparisons built up between those in the system and those out of it are great. By the end of the book, I found I was very much interested in some of the characters. The ending, well that was a shock!

This is a fabulous book to read, and I did struggle to find the flow at the beginning. I did read it in two sittings. The first sitting was a bit wobbly and at 33% I decided to have a break, this turned out to be a great time to pause and then coming back to it the following night. I then found myself unable to put this book down and finished it.

This is a book that has loads of reviews, has loads of opinions and there are probably theories and it will have been analysed in every aspect. I read for the pleasure of it, so for me, this book was one that intrigued me. It did feel disjointed, to begin with, but it grew on me. I enjoyed this and I am very glad that I have read this book.

For a book that was written in 1931 and published in 1932, it has some brilliant imagination and foresight into a possible future. A world where people are engineered to fit into a hierarchical society. It is a very good book and it is one I would happily recommend.

19 people found this helpful

B. Wilson

Horrendous Kindle Formatting / Font Errors - Returned for refund

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 20, 2021

Verified Purchase

I haven't read the book yet because by page 5 of the Kindle edition I realised I couln't continue with the horrendously bad font errors - attached picture from the PC Kindle reader, but is the same on Android Kindle and by the sound of other reviews here any kindle.

Completely substandard product that I got refunded.

TIP: It's not immediately obvious how to return an e-book.

Instruction for Amazon UK Website:

1. Go to "Manage Content and Devices" from the menu below your "Account and Lists"
2. In the Action column, click the elipsis button (...) beside the book
3. Click "Return for Refund" text link
4. Select "Quality Issues" as the reason
5. Click "Return for Refund" button

23 people found this helpful

bal of balham

If you never read another book read this one!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

I had never thought to read this book and was actually searching for a film (The Shape of Things to Come) which I thought was from a story by Aldous Huxley. Instead I bought Brave New World and am glad to have do so. Written at a time (1932) when science fiction was very much still in its infancy the predictions of medical and technical advances are remarkable for their accuracy and the changes to social mores coupled with eugenics is frighteningly familiar. This book should be compulsory reading for everyone, in particular those world leaders (both secular and religious), scientists, the armed forces, industrialists and overzealous do-gooders who wish to impose upon in so many ways.

87 people found this helpful

A. Russell

Disappointing drivel, clumsily written and thoroughly unsatisfying to read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 13, 2020

Verified Purchase

After finishing George Orwell's 1984 and, telling everyone who'd listen, how good it was, I was recommended to read Brave New World.

I accept that the frame of reference from Huxley's era was very different to ours, sadly it doesn't translate very well to this story at all.

The thing about 1984 is the prophetic way in that it describes the 'future', our present day. Orwell's writing style is relaxing to read and allows you to become absorbed in the world that he expertly crafts.

Brave New World does none of this, it is an awkward, difficult read. Not in a fun, challenging way but in a structureless and clumsy manner. It's repeated returns to 'toddler's erotic play' are revealing more of the author's own obsession than a narrative on his predicition of the future.

The main characters are not given any flesh, and I was unable to find any common ground with any of them, and found myself unable to understand any of their, apparently, randomly changing motivations.

This text has very strong undertones of religious zealotry and tries to persuade the reader in favour of religion over all. Further, the constant copy-and-paste paragraphs from Shakespeare became tiresome.

Very disappointed in this book, I persevered in the hope of a satisfactory ending but found it to be rushed, confusing and ridiculous.

If you're looking for a classic that provides a 'prophecy of the future', read 1984 instead, don't bother with Brave New World, you'll only leave disappointed.

33 people found this helpful

See all reviews

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	6pm Score deals on fashion brands	AbeBooks Books, art & collectibles	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Sell on Amazon Start a Selling Account

Amazon Business Everything For Your Business	Amazon Fresh Groceries & More Right To Your Door	AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally	Home Services Experienced Pros Happiness Guarantee	Amazon Ignite Sell your original Digital Educational Resources	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Listen to Books & Original Audio Performances	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Box Office Mojo Find Movie Box Office Data	ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics	DPReview Digital Photography	Fabric Sewing, Quilting & Knitting

Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Prime Video Direct Video Distribution Made Easy

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on Quality Used Products	Whole Foods Market America’s Healthiest Grocery Store	Woot! Deals and Shenanigans	Zappos Shoes & Clothing	Ring Smart Home Security Systems

eero WiFi Stream 4K Video in Every Room	Blink Smart Security for Every Home	Neighbors App Real-Time Crime & Safety Alerts	Amazon Subscription Boxes Top subscription boxes – right to your door	PillPack Pharmacy Simplified	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust

Follow the Authors

Brave New World Reprint Edition

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the authors

Aldous Huxley

John Sutherland

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries