Published 1932 / Length 288 pages
‘I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.’ – ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World is set in the year of Our Ford 632: 632 years after Henry Ford created the first mass-produced car, the Model T, and became the deity of humankind. The novel describes a society based on the principles of ‘community, identity and stability’, in which families have been eliminated and citizens are both biologically and psychologically conditioned to accept their station in life with pleasure. There is a great deal of ambivalence throughout: there are both advantages and perils to the World State’s system. Bernard Marx, a high-ranking individual unhappy with his lot, travels to one of the few Savage Reservations – where the expense of bringing ‘civilization’ as this world knows it has been deemed too great – and observes the human chaos of ‘pre-Ford’ life.
‘In Nineteen Eighty-Four … people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.’ – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986)
• It has been suggested that, as Brave New World is primarily a novel of ideas, the characters are unconvincing and merely symbolic. Do you agree?
• The World State aims to eliminate emotional partnerships and the notion of family – why is this?
• How many of Huxley’s predictions now look prophetic? Which major aspects of progress did he fail to anticipate?
• ‘Everybody’s happy now’: to what extent is this true of the World State?
• Would you rather live in Huxley’s London or the Savage Reservation?
• Like many intellectuals, Huxley expressed qualified support for eugenics in the years before the Second World War, when he was writing Brave New World. By the post-war period, Hitler’s actions had made any such sympathies unthinkable.
• In later years, Huxley said that if he had rewritten the novel, he would have provided a third option for John, beyond the World State and the Savage Reservation.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by GEORGE ORWELL (see here) / We by Yevgeny Zamyatin / The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (see here) / A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (see here) – compare these visions of dystopian futures.
• Men Like Gods by H. G. WELLS – Huxley began Brave New World as a parody of this futuristic utopian novel.
• The Tempest by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE – John has parallels with Caliban; the novel’s title comes from one of Miranda’s speeches.
• Brave New World Revisited (1958) by ALDOUS HUXLEY – the author revisits his novel and analyses the extent to which the modern world resembles his vision.