“O brave new worlds,
That have such people in them!” 1
1 The quotation is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (act 5, scene 1, line 183), where Miranda, daughter of Prospero, the rightful but exiled Duke of Milan, says, “O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” referring to the first humans she has seen (apart from her father): They have been shipwrecked on the island where she lives, which is peopled by fantastical creatures. Clearly Abbott’s misquotation is deliberate: His “brave new worlds” are the spaces of different dimensions, especially the third and higher. Abbott is expressing enthusiasm, as did Miranda, who prefaces this remark with “O, wonder! How many godly creatures are there here! How beauteous making is!” However, the same quotation inspired the ironic title of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, about a totalitarian future in which babies are grown in machines, sex is purely recreational, drugs are officially sanctioned, and everyone is brainwashed into “knowing their place” in a rigid class system of alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons. (Interestingly enough, Prospero shares Huxley’s irony; his next line following Miranda’s is “’Tis new to thee.”)