About the book

Too Far Ahead of Its Time?

The Contemporary Response to Brave New World (1932)

CONSIDERING THE STATUS it enjoys as a classic today, reviews for Huxley’s Brave New World were surprisingly negative. With the rise of Fascism in western Europe and a world shaken by massive economic depression, perhaps the novel hit too close to the bone; or maybe Huxley’s harsh and unsettling vision was simply too far ahead of its time.

The reviewer for the British journal New Statesman and Nation led the charge: “[T]his squib about the future is a thin little joke, epitomised in the undergraduate jest of civilization dated A.F., and a people who refer reverently to ‘our Ford’—not a bad little joke, and what it lacks in richness Mr. Huxley tries to make up by repetition; but we want rather more to a prophecy than Mr. Huxley gives us. . . . The fact is that Mr. Huxley does not really care for the story—the idea alone excites him. There are brilliant, sardonic little splinters of hate aimed at the degradation he has foreseen for our world; there are passages in which he elaborates conjectures and opinions already familiar to readers of his essays. . . . There are not surprises in it; and if he had no surprises to give us, why should Mr. Huxley have bothered to turn this essay in indignation into a novel?” This reviewer concludes that Brave New World is inert as a work of art: “Nothing can bring it alive.”

Several reviewers expressed discomfort—or outright disgust—at Huxley’s preoccupation with sexuality. They were offended at the freewheeling, emotionless promiscuity of Huxley’s utopians. As the anonymous reviewer for London’s Times Literary Supplement wrote, “it is not easy to become interested in the scientifically imagined details of life in this mechanical Utopia. Nor is there compensation in the amount of attention that he gives to the abundant sex life of these denatured human beings.”

Granville Hicks, briefly the literary spokesman for the Communist Party USA, attacked Brave New World primarily on political grounds. Huxley’s most grievous sin, in Hicks’s opinion, was his failure to address the important social issues of the day. “With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe, and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about? . . . The unpleasantness of life in the utopia that, as he sees it, is just a century or two ahead,” Hicks declared sarcastically in The New Republic. His partisan assault ended with a nasty salvo aimed at Huxley himself as an exemplar of the privileges and oppressive values of the ruling class: “[He] has money, social position, talent, friends, prestige, and he is effectively insulated from the misery of the masses. Of course he wants something to worry about—even if he has to go a long, long way to find it. . . . Mr. Huxley must have his chance to suffer and be brave.”

That was the lowest blow any reviewer delivered.

The positive reviews were, by and large, rather restrained and cautious. “Huxley has made rowdy and impertinent sport of the World State,” John Chamberlain wrote in his polite if somewhat mystified review in the New York Times. The only critic to see beyond the caustic laughter to the serious, even savage protest at the heart of the book was Edward Cushing, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature: “Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist’s faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that when one has closed his book, one remembers—rather than his cleverness and his wit, which one admires and forgets.” This was as enthusiastic as any critic allowed himself to be.

Despite the initial tepid response, Brave New World struck an extraordinary chord with the public, and over the subsequent six decades it has been reread and interpreted by generations of readers. After World War II, Huxley added a foreword to the book in which he assessed the radical changes in the world situation since its first publication. He admitted one “vast and obvious failure of foresight”—the absence of any reference to nuclear fission. And he speculated that his utopia, which he had projected six hundred years into the future, was actually approaching far sooner: “Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century.” 

Prophecies Fulfilled

The Contemporary Response to Brave New World Revisited (1958)

WHEN INTERVIEWED on the television program Brain Trust in 1958, Aldous Huxley declared, “It is rather alarming to find that only twenty-seven years [after writing Brave New World] quite a number of those forecasts have already come true, and come true with vengeance. . . . Some of them were foreseen, and I think some of them I didn’t have the imagination to foresee, but I think there is a whole armory at the disposal of potential dictators at the moment.”

It was the height of the Cold War when Huxley was asked to write a series of articles for Newsday that discussed how a political dictator might manipulate and control the population by altering its thoughts and behavior. But as he researched the topic, the scope of Huxley’s concerns grew, and the articles published as “Tyranny Over the Mind” became a wider-ranging examination of the problem of freedom in an age of over population, over organization, and improved techniques of propaganda. The articles were published in book form as Brave New World Revisited.

The New York Times Book Review wrote that “Huxley uses his erudite knowledge of human relations to compare our actual world with his prophetic fantasy of 1931. It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time.” The Chicago Sunday Tribune found Brave New World Revisited “a thought-jabbing, terrifying book,” while Time and Tide (London) warned that it delivered “a message which, enforced by Mr. Huxley’s seriousness and clear dialectic on dealing with social problems, we cannot ignore.”

When he wrote Brave New World Revisited, Huxley was sixty-three years old and afflicted with serious eye problems that might have impeded a lesser intellect. As his brother Julian remarked in his Memories, “How Aldous managed to absorb (and still more digest) the colossal amount of facts and ideas which furnished his mind remains a mystery. . . . With his one good eye, he managed to skim through learned journals, popular articles, and books of every kind. He was apparently able to take them in at a glance, and what is more, to remember their essential content. His intellectual memory was phenomenal, doubtless trained by a tenacious will to surmount the original horror of threatened blindness.”

“I am sick and tired of this kind of writing,” Huxley confessed after he had finished Brave New World Revisited, “but at the same time find it frustratingly difficult to find the right story line for my projected Utopian novel.” That novel—Island—which Huxley saw as “a kind of reverse Brave New World,” was published in 1962, the year before Huxley’s death.