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Brave New World (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
Brave New World (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
Brave New World (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
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Brave New World (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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REA's MAXnotes for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 1, 2013
ISBN9780738675169
Brave New World (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

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Rating: 3.9360730593607305 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found Huxley's world to be well described and narrowly focused. This narrow focus allows for a good contrast between the World State and the Savage. I also enjoyed that, while John argues he has more freedom in his culture than that of the World State's, his use of asceticism makes one wonder just how much freedom he truly had.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    While this isn't one of my favorites, I am overwhelmed by Huxley's ability to write of such a world from the vantage point of living in the 1930's. I also found his ability to address politics, sex, religion, society, etc. in such a short novel with that kind of clarity (from a point of view standpoint) to be rather amazing. I am glad I read this book. It is certainly thought provoking.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    No point in rehashing a book we are all familiar with but at this point (in all of my godly and infinite wisdom) I'd really advise removing this from the "canon" as there's probably some better recent works to replace it. It's astoundingly accurate in its prophecy for our times but by chapter 9, the worth of the story is spent and the rest merely becomes an effort in perverted perseverance, with nothing of value to add to mind or soul (or good literature for that matter).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My son's English teacher gives out 2 grades for every writing assignment, one for content and one for mechanics. I wish I could have 2 ratings for Brave New World - one for the scope of how the ideas in this book challenge conventional society and one for the way it was executed. In Huxley's dystopian world, the overall happiness of society is paramount. One of the issues we have today is that not everyone can be happy. There are always jobs that are more arduous or distasteful. People who hold these jobs are at the bottom of the social pyramid and not only have to work at these jobs, but know that they are the lowest of the low. In Huxley's world, people are no longer born, but hatched from embryos that are manipulated through their entire development. Embryos targeted for lower caste jobs are stunted through a lack of nutrition or chemical interference. These people will be physically smaller, less intelligent and will be programmed through hypnotic suggestion to accept and enjoy their fate in life. Problems arise in this ideal world when a savage from a reservation filled with people living the old imperfect society comes in contact with this new world. Huxley raises so many good philosophical questions about the tradeoff between individual choice and the benefit of the collective, freedom vs. happiness, and even whether or not the belief in a god is inherent in human nature. This book seems to live on the Most Banned Book list and even made it to the top 10 in 2011. My guess is that people are objecting to the portrayal of sexual promiscuity as an advancement in culture. Another great discussion point - is monogamy an advanced behavior or a result of our more base feelings of jealousy and ownership? This book is really an amazing one to discuss and covers such a broad range of topics. For content - 5 big stars.

    Now for mechanics, or in this case execution. This book reads more like a philosophical essay that is trying to squeeze itself into the form of a novel. The characters are flat and predictable. And way too often, characters like the Director, will have long winded speeches about why society changed, making the book feel more like a philosophy lecture than a story. I would give this book 2 stars for execution.

    I listened to the audiobook which was performed by actor Michael York. He was fantastic and did an amazing variety of voices. If anything, his narration made the characters more complex and believable.

    Overall, this book deserves it's high praise and placement on all those lists of influential books that everyone should read. It raises excellent questions that make you rethink many of our basic assumptions in society. But, if I were a teacher, I'd send it back for a rewrite to get that well deserved 'A'.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Brave New World is about a dissatisfied little man (figuratively and literally), a pneumatic girl who's getting too attached to a companion, a poet in search of something to write about, and a limnal figure born of civilization and reared outside it. Huxley phrases the modern dilemma as freedom against societal engineering.It's a dystopian fantasy, so fleshing out the characters isn't top priority. The conversation between the head of the government and the Savage sounds like a James Bond villain exposition. But what is completely remarkable about this book is its \immersion in 30s gender ideology. In a world where sexuality and reproduction is completely controlled by the state (which is, in turn, controlled by men), challenge to the state comes not from, say, half the population, but from isolated men who chafe at the restriction of having to have as much sex as possible with as many women as they can find.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A classic that is probably more relevant today than when it was written. I was left questioning my own beliefs about the morality of eugenics and my preconceived ideas on intimacy. Left with a haunted image by the end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I remember finding the first chapter boring, the rest pretty good, and the end bewilderingly sad. I'm not sure what the author was trying to elicit, other than the empty feeling I felt towards the end. I'm not sure whether the empty feeling is a good thing, overall. Maybe I should reread it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I thought I should read this having recently finished 1984. This book was not particularly well written or easy to read. The first few chapters were especially confusing.

    It is sometime in the future and the world is a very different place. Babies are being manufactured in laboratories staffed by ever youthful adults who were also grown in labs. Deformities and disabilities have been eliminated. Individuality in appearance, thought and speech no longer exists within the civilised communities. Everyone has been conditioned from birth to think the same thoughts and behave in the same manner as everyone else. They are conditioned to make mass purchases of products to ensure consumerism ticks over. Everything they could wish for is on tap including sex with anyone they choose. There are no individual relationships and feelings are largely absent being seen as a weakness.

    Bernard is not quite the same as everyone else, he feels uncomfortable and that there must be more to life than conditioning and duplicated experiences. He stumbles into uncivilised areas full of savages in his search for humanity. The savages seem to be remarkably similar to the human race as we know it. What will Bernard make of the fascinating horror that he has discovered and what will he do with his knowledge?

    For some reason I found this book more chilling than 1984. The ideas were just a little too close to home to make enjoyable reading. Governments and those that think they know best are progressively conditioning the human race to think, act and speak alike through political correctness. They are eliminating all uncomfortable topics and subjects. People are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. They seek things for themselves at the expense of others. That is what happens when people abandon God and He eventually leaves them to their own devices. Brave New World may not be as far off as we think.....

    For Christians, however, we can take comfort in knowing that all things are in God's hands and under His control. That nothing can happen without His allowing it and that one day Jesus will return and this earth will pass away.

    Brave New World may make readers think. But it has a lot of sexual content some of which is quite graphic although not explicit. There is the odd swear word and some violence. For those reasons I wouldn't recommend it for sensitive readers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    READ IN ENGLISH

    I read Brave New World for English literature, and it really made me want to read more Dystopian literature (I soon afterwards read 1984, Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid's Tale and Fahrenheit 451).



    I particularly liked the beginning. It was so strong, throwing us into the world and the absurd idea of producing people in a factory. (It's a very nice way to give us insight into the world we've just entered, with its ridiculous caste system). Unhappiness is cured in the society, but is it? (Is it not worse to be forbidden to feel depressed?) The start was very interesting, but especially the middle part worked not so well for me. The story seemed to drag a bit on that part. The ending again, was stronger.

    Personally I liked Brave New World better than 1984. I would definitely recommend it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Amazingly prescient in affect, if not fact, for what the future held.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow! This is such a great book. For being written in 1932, the writing style had a much more contemporary feel than I had expected going in. I was also pleasantly surprised by the slyly humorous undercurrents. How will I ever erase Morgana Rothschild's unibrow from my mind? :-0)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'll admit that I read this because I felt like I ought to; I didn't particularly enjoy it. While the overall theme was good, the specific things Huxley was worried about causing the downfall of freedom and human progress are...bizarre, to say the least. There's got to be a more recent novel that does this without harping on about the evils of women. As an ancestor to the genre, it's important, but that doesn't mean it's still the most important thing for people to read now.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is really well told--I found the writing absolutely amazing. And as a dystopia, it is absolutely thought provoking, and I'm sure it was ground-breaking for its time. But...I despised all of the characters, the women characters were absurdly drawn, and I was disgusted with the attitude Huxley takes toward his constructed world. I found myself arguing with the book *constantly*. I just don't see the world the same way Huxley does. So while I grant that this is an important piece of literature and definitely a seminal work of science fiction, I can't say that I would read it again, or necessarily even recommend it.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I hated this book. Too weird
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book was thoroughly depressing.

    The fact that the stability of civilization was maintained because of the genetic tampering of the fetuses in their bottles was horrifying. Various castes were created to fulfill specific needs of society (ie Alphas for management positions, Deltas for factory work, etc).

    Children were brainwashed from birth to be self-indulgent, narcissists interested only in comfort and consumption. Even the introduction of John Savage into their carefully created society was unable to shake their foundation of brainwashing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's a classic - I feel like I can't give any less that 5 stars for a book that's been so influential.

    This month's post-apocalyptic book club selection (even though technically, it's dystopic, not apocalyptic). I dug it out of my crate of books-from-high school that my dad unexpectedly dropped off to me one day saying, "hey, these were in my basement."

    I was surprised to find that I actually didn't remember as much of the book as I would've sworn that I did. I must've read it last over 20 years ago, and although there there bits that were clear, some I'd totally forgotten. Others in the book club admitted that they as well had done thing like confuse parts of '1984' with this book, in memory (seems like a lot of people read both back-to-back, initially!)

    Definite differences this time around: I had to look at the politics more analytically. I kept finding myself saying: 'what exactly is Huxley saying here?' I didn't uncritically accept or agree with all of his presumptions or conclusions this time. I also found myself more sympathetic to Lenina in some ways than I was when I was a teenager.

    It's interesting that in his introduction to the book (which I believe was written in 1946, 14 years after initial publication) Huxley disavows the dichotomy between the controlled, soma-addicted urban dwellers and his depiction of the 'primitives.' He said that he would've liked to show a third, 'sane' way of living... but that would've really destroyed the book and its focus completely.

    Still, the strength of the book lies in its depiction of Huxley's dystopia, where people are in service to technology, literally engineered and conditioned to be content in their place, and the 'happy' majority bear a disturbing resemblance to jocks and sorority girls. The depiction of the primitive village is not nearly as strong, or as convincing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Bernard Marx likes to see himself as a bit of a rebel in the future London he lives in. Every body is happy, with people genetically engineered to be suited to the tasks they must perform. Children are decanted from glass vessels, not born. Then, on a vacation trip, Bernard discovers the lost girlfriend and son lost by an official in a New Mexico reservation. He returns them to Englsnd, where neither the woman, nor her savage-raised son can adjust to the "brave new world".
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ein dystopischer Klassiker. Das Buch für sich genommen hätte ich wohl nur mit 2,5 Sternen bewertet, da in der Geschichte selbst kaum Spannung liegt. Allerdings ist der Roman dennoch spannend, wenn man im Kopf behält, dass er 1932 verfasst wurde und dass viele Tendenzen, die Huxley antizipiert hat, sich heute mehr und mehr bewahrheiten. Das regt zum Nachedenken darüber an, ob sich unsere Einstellung zu im Buch behandelten Themen wie Gentechnik und Sexualität der natürlich überspitzten Darstellung Huxelys noch weiter annähern werden. Streben wir selbst auf eine Brave New World zu, oder leben wir sogar schon in einer?
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I've been anxious to read this for years because every English major raves about it. However, it wasn't great. Perhaps it's because I'm such a fan of 1984 and the Giver, but this Utopian novel just seemed lame in comparison. I didn't think the freakish Utopia was really that bad! It seems that someday we may end up conquoring old age and physical flaws of all sorts, which gets me thinking, but is this really so bad? The characters didn't seem to suffer any; only Lenina when she actually did feel love/desire for something unattainable, caused by the unplanned association with the "savage." Yes, the life of the savage and the fordians seemed insane, but the latter seemed less so. We didn't even have a character that was truly dissatisfied with the status quo. The government seemed benevolent and genuine. What is so jolting about this book? I didn't get it.

    I'd recommend the Uglies series instead of this one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just love this book. I think that Huxley put us in an excelent perspective of what the world could be, an certainly is a good aproximation.
    The concepts used in this book appear in several science fiction movies, and while the time is passing this concepts seems more close to reality. We see how the fertilization is creating more "perfect" babies every day, how the type of life that we have nowadays are forcing more the parents to be away from the kids and as a consequence, are other people who take care of them, and even worse, the people are trusting more in machines to take care of their kids than humans, making the kids to loose their own trust in humanity.
    Brave New World not only gave me a great perspective of the future, but also it was well written and knows how to put the reader inside the book. I highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of my all time favourites
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Utter nonsense and literary tripe! This author joins a number of similarly terrible Ayn Randian authors.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this powerful, engaging and fascinating, I hadn't read it since I was a teenager, and had forgotten much of it. One thing I'd forgotten was how convincingly written the Controller's arguments are (or maybe I am just older now, and more reactionary) Stability... Wheels must turn steady, but cannot turn unattended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment. Crying... how can then tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend the wheels... The corpses of thousand thousand thousand men and women would be hard to bury or burn... I like to think about dystopias as exaggerated pictures of what the author was worried about. Brave New World is a dystopia against comfort and getting what you want and being content with your lot. It's making the case that the things that make the human condition meaningful are also the things that make it hurt. The idea that happiness isn't the greatest goal, and there is something further - truth, beauty, love - something harder and less comfortable.I'd forgotten how much it was about sex. The idea that anyone can sleep with anyone whenever they want, childishly, and so there is no space left to have a meaningful relationship, or to have complex feelings. The noble savage ideas about marriage for life contrasted with this. The way he wants Lenina, and hates himself for wanting LeninaIt's definitely a young man's book. The author's vision - 'I want a Nobel Savage bought up away from the culture, to cast light on how deficient it is. But I want him to speak in shakespeare quotes, because that's Really Cool, and Shakespeare is a powerful exemplar of what the civilised culture has lost' - is bold and powerful, but doesn't actually hold up to a lot of world building scrutiny.Anyway, if you want a powerful book about 'what's the point of life, and relationships, and what do we lose if we settle for bland contentment' this is a classic for a reason.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Brave New WorldFascinating4 StarsHey, I'm always tardy to the party but I made it. BNW is the first of many great dystopias which continues to have resonance and power today. Eerie. Some of the assumptions or predictions (test tube babies) made have become a reality. It's a great read and well worth recommending.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    To actually put in perspective the quality of this book, I will have to start by stating that I have recently read few books by current authors who also have written dystopia novels: The Hunger Games (only the first book thus far), Divergent and Insurgent by Veronica Roth, and the first three books in the Frankenstein Series by Dean Koontz. Koontz's books are his reiteration of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (what I consider the best book ever written)and Brave New World, which I now consider the best conceptual dystopia novel that I have read. My personal opinion is that the books I have listed above though excellent books in their own right are merely child play in comparison to Aldous Huxley's work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this book many years ago, and did not fully appreciate it then. It has been years since I read the book, and suddenly it has taken over a whole new meaning, In the introduction to the book, the reviewers compared "Brave New World" with "1984", and postulated which of these two has been more prescient.I would say both, equally, and in good measure. With Google, Facebook, Amazon etc becoming more and more adept at garnering data about us, "1984" is definitely upon us.Yet, with the shiny malls, the plastic-slick soul that we all are confronted with, so is "Brave New World". The book is written in a sort of limp manner, deliberately, I feel, and this tends to heighten the effect of a world that is 'perfectly' ordered. Strangely, the caste system makes itself felt. Human equality is just a myth.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Audio Book performed by Michael York

    This is a classic science fiction / dystopian novel in which Huxley imagines a future world that is focused on mass production, consumption, and a homogenous civilization. Babies are grown in bottles and conditioned via chemicals and training as children to fill assigned roles – from Alphas (the top echelon) to Epsilons (the lowest class). The World State’s economy relies on everyone remaining happy in their assigned roles and on centralized control over reproduction, maturation and employment. Families no longer exist; in fact, “mother” is considered a horrifying obscenity. Religion is no longer practiced, though they do sort of worship Ford (i.e. Henry Ford, who promoted the use of assembly lines for mass production). The world is one large, homogenous “happy” place. Except …. A few places on the earth where the geography is not conducive to the grand plan have been set aside where humans are sequestered. These fenced-in “savages” procreate naturally and have antiquated customs such as marriage and religion.

    The novel focuses on three young people: Bernard Marx, an Alpha sleep-specialist who is somewhat of a misfit; his friend Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering; and Lenina, a beautiful Beta nurse at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center. Lenina’s attraction to Bernard prompts them to take a trip to the New Mexico Reservation where they encounter Linda, a Beta who was lost on a trip decades ago and has been trapped there ever since, and her son John, who has grown up among the savages, learning to read from an ancient copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This encounter is the linchpin upon which the plot revolves.

    First published in 1932 this is a brilliant work of imagination. Huxley has created a world civilization far different from what he knew and even from what we know nearly 100 years after he wrote the book. I was particularly struck by the focus on consumerism – “end it, don’t mend it” – especially when at the time of the writing, the world was in a Great Depression. Huxley also attacks religion, and societal mores. The novel as been on many “must read” lists; the Modern Library ranked it 5th on its 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century; it has also frequently been challenged, banned or removed from various curricula.

    The audiobook is capably performed by Michael York. He does a fine job with the various characters, including the women. But I particularly love his interpretation of the dialogue between John (the savage) and Mustafa Mond (the Resident World Controller for Western Europe), when they are discussing literature, philosophy and religion.

    This is not my preferred genre, but I was caught up in the world Huxley imagined and was interested in the characters and where the story would go. I had always thought I read this in high school. I certainly knew about the “bottle babies,” mass-production and caste system. But reading it now I cannot believe my all-girls Catholic high school would have assigned this book to us back in 1964. I certainly didn’t remember the emphasis on sex, contraception, and drug use. Could we have had an abridge/sanitized version? I am left thinking I never actually read it before. I’m certainly glad I have read it now.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this a difficult pill to swallow, although Huxleys story is fiction and futuristic parrellels can be drawn from history and the present.

    I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment so all I'll say is that I would not want a world like this to become a reality.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Brave New World is a classic of both literature and science fiction, depicting a future world state which is (depending on your point of view) both utopian and dystopian. The populace is kept controlled and perpetually happy by a mixture of drugs, sleep learning and infant conditioning, the family unit has been abolished, free love is the norm (“everybody belongs to everybody else”) and there is no longer any religion, literature or non-conformist thinking. In certain parts of the world, people are kept in “savage reserves,” and the plot of Brave New World largely revolves around a “savage” from New Mexico who is taken from his reserve and brought to London, where he clashes with what he sees as a numbing and degraded civilisation.Brave New World is most often compared to George Orwell’s 1984, both being British science fiction novels from around the same time which examined a dystopian future. It actually reminded me much more of Fahrenheit 451 – a novel which no doubt was greatly drawn from Brave New World. In 1984, the state oppressively controls information; in both Huxley and Bradbury’s novels, the state has successfully trained the populace to not desire information. In both novels, people are kept entertained with the science fiction version of bread and circuses. Huxley argues a little less forcefully than Bradbury that most people are dumb, since the characters of his novel have been manipulated and conditioned from birth, but the feeling is still there. Orwell’s novel, to my mind, is more timeless and important. Elements of all three books have been realised to at least some extent, but 1984’s government surveillance and propaganda is probably more pertinent than, say, drawing some kind of parallel between the trashy mass media of Brave New World and modern society’s love of reality TV and talent shows.Both books, however, are classics because of the important (and at the time, unprecedented) things they have to say, rather than their worth as actual literature. Brave New World is required reading for anybody working their way through the human canon, but I didn’t really enjoy it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm sure I read this years ago, but didn't remember a word of it. I'm glad I read it again. It is oddly prophetic, not in its particulars, but in its insightful asides (e.g. "Our Ford himself"--speaking of Henry, who has become a god--"did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.") This is a tad more subtle societal control than 1984, but a worthy companion volume.

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Brave New World (MAXNotes Literature Guides) - Sharon Yunker

Linda

SECTION ONE

Introduction

The Life and Work of Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in 1894 in Godalming, England. His father, Leonard, was a doctor and his mother, Julia, was the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold. At 16, Huxley contracted an eye disease, which caused him to endure blindness for three years and ended any possibility of a medical career. However, because of his family background and his own interests, his scientific training became an important part of his writing. He did state that he regretted missing some of that training during his blindness, training which, he said further, would be a necessity in order to live in the world of the twentieth century. As his blindness abated, he found he could read with the aid of a magnifying glass, and he managed to read well enough to earn his degree in English literature from Oxford University.

Huxley wrote across the literary spectrum: short stories, plays, nonfiction, and critical essays on topics ranging from art to literature to religion to censorship to poetry. His first book of poems, The Burning Wheel, was published in 1916 when he was 22 years old. Because of his vision problems, Huxley did not serve in World War I. He instead finished his university education and worked in a government office.

His early novels, such as Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), contain criticisms of the British upper classes. Huxley said that the interruption of his own upper-class education had saved him from becoming one of those proper English gentlemen. He married for the first time in 1919. For awhile, he and his wife lived in Italy, where he met and became a lifelong friend of the controversial D. H. Lawrence. Mark Rampion, a character in Point Counter Point (1928), is based on Lawrence.

Huxley moved to the United States in 1937, living in Taos, New Mexico and in California. His first wife died in 1955, and he remarried in 1956. He was fluent in four languages in addition to his native English, and he read Latin. He traveled widely, especially in Italy and France. His last novel, Island, was published in 1962. He was a contributing writer to several magazines, including Life, and he collaborated on several screenplays in Hollywood. He also wrote numerous critical essays and commentaries.

Aldous Huxley died in California in 1963. Many of his original manuscripts are at the University of California.

Historical Background

British life in 1932 was very different from American life. Almost an entire generation of men had been lost in World War I. Oxford University enrollment was only 491 in 1917, down from 3,181 in 1914. Among many of the upper-class poets and writers of the time—sometimes called the Auden Generation, after the poet W H. Auden—there was a sense of disillusionment and futility. Britain’s foreign investments had been depleted by war debts and loans. Higher living standards, prices, wages, and taxes became the order of the day in post-war Britain. By 1922, overpopulation had caused passage of the Empire Settlement Act to encourage and finance settlement in the dominions.

The 1920s were also years of mass unemployment, and the Communist Soviet Union was making inroads into the labor movement. After many wars, those on the homefront who had sacrificed for the war effort felt they deserved their just rewards.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model-T, in any color you choose so long as it’s black. In 1914, he opened his Highland Park, Michigan factory, equipped with the first electric conveyor belt assembly line. A Model-T could now be assembled in 93 minutes. Consequently, Ford had 45 percent of the new automobile market. He paid his workers the highest wages in the industry—a whopping five dollars a day. In return, he demanded that his workers live by his standards: wives were not to work or take in boarders, employees were not to drink in local bars, and families were to attend church each Sunday. He sent men out into the workers’ neighborhoods to make sure his rules were being followed. Ford was considered a bigot and was also paranoid; he feared for his family’s lives. By creating Greenfield Village near Detroit, he tried to recapture and reproduce what he viewed as a simple, happy past—the good old days.

Thus, science not only gave man a better knowledge of his world, and the technology to make living easier, but it also gave him new means of destroying himself. The same gasoline engine used to propel automobiles and trains was reinvented for use in airplanes that could drop bombs—as early as World War I. Science and technology together began recreating industry, which for more people than Henry Ford meant bigger profits and anxieties.

Additionally, the advent of electrical lighting in both home and factory created shift work, which of course, interferes with established biological rhythms. Electricity also created a brighter night-life with more possibilities, and it gave the middle and upper classes new appliances to make living easier and more comfortable.

The assembly lines, with their shift work, forced workers to meet the demands of both man and machine. Workers could spend an entire shift in one place along the assembly line, repeating the same action again and again. Thus, a worker answered to two bosses—one human, one mechanical. Only one understood pain and fatigue, however, and only one could stop the other. Consequently, most workers were more likely to be driven by machines than to actually drive them.

This was the newly mechanized, scientific, controlled world which became the model for Huxley’s Brave New World, which one critic regarded as ...an exercise in pessimistic prognostication, a terrifying Utopia.

In 1958, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he discussed what he perceived as the threats to humanity that had developed since the publication of his novel in 1932. These threats were overpopulation, propaganda, scientific advancement, and his belief that man must not give up his freedom for the unthinking ease of a life organized by the power of a few over the masses. This was something that had happened in Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China since 1932.

Huxley saw scientific progress as a vain deceit which would produce a world with no joy—one in which endeavors are frustrated and sexual satisfaction becomes ashes. Brave New World is the utopian nightmare of scientific deceit, unlike the futuristic novels of H. G. Wells, whose optimism held that man falls to rise again.

Master List of Characters

The Director—In charge of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. He has a secret to reveal.

Henry Foster—A Supervisor in the London Hatchery. He loves facts, figures, and statistics.

Mustapha Mond—The Resident Controller for Western Europe; one of ten Controllers in the World. He possesses some of the now forbidden books, like the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Lenina Crowne—A Beta Nurse in the Hatchery. She is well-conditioned to this New World—until she meets the Savage.

Bernard Marx—An Alpha-Plus expert in hypnopaedia who does not meet the physical standards of his group. He thus yearns for acceptance, which he hopes the Savage will grant him.

Fanny Crowne—A friend of Lenina, but not related. She works in the Bottling Room of the Hatchery and is well-conditioned.

Benito HooverAn Alpha Worker at the Hatchery. He is an acceptor of conditioning and life as it exists and spends time with Lenina, which irritates Bernard.

George Edzel—Another Alpha Worker who is friendly with Lenina.

Helmholtz Watson—An Alpha-Plus lecturer and writer for the College of Emotional Engineering. His overly superior intelligence has alienated him from society in the same respect as Bernard’s physical inferiority.

The Warden—An Alpha-Minus; in charge of the Savage Reservation.

The Indian Guide—He takes Lenina and Bernard into the Reservation.

John the Savage—Considered an outsider in his world of the Reservation. His mother Linda was from the Old World, thus rendering them both unacceptable.

Linda—John’s mother. Left at the Reservation by the Director. She has aged as a normal human being and shocks the New World when she returns. She was a Beta Worker in the Hatchery.

Popé—He appears only in Linda and John’s memories. He had been Linda’s Indian lover and abuser. He supplied her with the alcohol she craved.

Mitsima—An Indian who tries to teach Indian skills to John.

Dr. Shaw—He supervises Linda’s care when she returns from the Reservation, authorizing unlimited soma until her death.

Human Element Manager—He shows John the Electrical Equipment Corporation.

Dr. Gaffney—The Provost

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