Hanne's blog

- by Aldous Huxley

This is a classic one has to read because one would sometimes miss references otherwise.

The title "Brave new world" is taken from a Shakespeare quote really:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

(The Tempest).

It is a future vision written in 1932 and the plot is supposed to go on
some 600 years later.

It is about a caste based nightmare civilization with artificial reproduction, to avoid the mess of sexual reproduction and to control the embryos' development into the desired caste, and some savages living like pueblo Indians, and the two cultures meeting and clashing.

There are some things he hits on the spot. Happy pills are perhaps early versions of soma. He thought consumerism needed to be induced on people by law. It did not. We are doing it voluntary and being grateful for it.

He has not foreseen the Internet, mobile communication or communication via radio broadcast from independent radio stations. He really thinks authorities would be able to keep people from knowing Shakespeare by forbidding it. As if that ever worked.

Then there is the way they receive Mr. John Savage in London. A bit
inconsistent. No xenophobia. But every time someone else breaks their
norms they freak out.

John's reaction to the city is just as weird. He can easily pick up the
phone and take a taxi to the hospital, he even thinks about asking for the
address on the phone. But his confused, mixed-up religion somehow makes sense. Today he would be considered a dangerous fundamentalist.

The most interesting thing is how they keep the delta and epsilon jobs
instead of automating it, because the deltas and epsilons - the two lowest castes - are not happy if they don't work. Perhaps we could learn something from that. And they could just stop producing epsilons if they wanted. We can't.