7/21/2023 0 Comments A brave new world author![]() There might be these minor details which betray that this relatively short novel was written back in 1932 (such as the over-emphasis of “neo-Pavlovian” conditioning of people, which would be likely replaced today by genetic engineering), but this does not throw us off the main message. It reads as if it was written by a contemporary. In fact, Huxley is anything but outdated. And therefore also for human beings who no longer deem it worthy to dust off the cover of old tomes. A mistake! With all its warning signs that it offers, writings like these are made to be pored over precisely at times like nowadays: when everything seems crystal clear, when media, experts and politicians in unison sign the tune of there being no alternative, it is the moment of greatest danger for independent thought. The fact remains that Brave New World appears in our mental landscape as one of those works that are often referred to already due to bearing a catchy title, but not so much read. There it is – a proof that every crisis is also an opportunity, at least an intellectual one. While I am interested in the tendencies that drive European societies towards multiplying the means of technical and social control for some time, the book has been escaping me until this point. After two years of living through Covid restrictions, as well as pondering through several weeks of the ongoing war in Ukraine, I concluded the time might be ripe to open Aldous Huxley’s opus Brave New World. ![]() ‘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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