1933 Aldous Huxley began writing Brave New World (as it was to be entitled) two years before it was published in 1932. It was a conscious change of style for him and a deliberate bid for popularity, using, as it did, the styles and conventions of science fiction.
It had higher purposes. He explained to his schoolmaster father, Leonard, on 24 August 1931 that the work was designed to satirise ‘the appallingness of Utopia’ – with specific darts directed against the doctrines of Freud, the Pavlovian educational systems currently advocated by behaviourists, and the commercial practices of Henry Ford (whose English Fordopolis was founded in Dagenham in 1928). But the seed of the work, he informed his father, was ‘the production of children in bottles’ – ectogenesis.
Huxley was the most magpie-eclectic of thinkers. The ‘bottled baby’ idea was not his, but was picked up from the bio-mathematician J.B.S. Haldane, in a paper read to the Heretic Society, Cambridge, on 4 February 1923. Entitled ‘Daedalus: or Science and the Future’, it forecast, in pseudo-documentary style, the social repercussions of the advance of life-science over the next decades:
It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1946 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann’s solution as medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of nutrition and support of the embryo was more difficult, and was only solved in the fourth year. Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air … France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method.
As Haldane foresaw, and Huxley imaginatively described, bottled babies would erode the traditional nuclear family structure and render sexual intercourse a means of pure carnal pleasure. A never-ending orgy. In fact, Haldane was ten years out in his prophecy. It was the contraceptive pill, in the early sixties, that brought about this drastic change in social life and sexual behaviour.
Sexual liberation was an uneasy subject for the authorities in 1932. Brave New World was banned in a number of countries – notably, with much huffing and puffing, in Australia. The ban was lifted on 29 March 1933. The Times drily noted: ‘It certainly has given the book an immense amount of gratuitous advertising.’ Not that Huxley’s witty dystopia needed it. The book remains his most popular, is widely prescribed in schools (even in Australasia) and will doubtless sell until AD 2540 (632 AF, i.e. ‘After Ford’), the year in which the action is set.