Customer Reviews

Brave New World

5 star:		(276)
4 star:		(125)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

I shouldn't fault Huxley for the fact that this book is so often classified with George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" -- but I can't conceal my disappointment. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was a frighteningly convincing Dystopian nightmare and a damn good story; "Brave New World" is a vaguely sketched fable with far too little background or character development (and far too many self-conscious references to Shakespeare). Huxley devises a potentially fascinating world which could be used as a setting for any number of engaging, thought-provoking plot lines -- and then fails to deliver one. The ending (which I won't reveal) could be foreseen well in advance; it seemed like little more than a last-ditch attempt to make the story interesting.

It's fashionable and, I think, considered "deep" to read a book like this and say "how prophetic" or "look, it's actually happening!" It's also disingenuous. Many reviewers have said something like "see, people today take drugs and watch silly movies for escapist entertainment -- Huxley's Utopia is just around the corner!" But people in Huxley's day also took drugs (he specifically mentions cocaine and alcohol abuse) and partook of the escapist entertainment of their day. The crux of Huxley's dystopian vision wasn't free love or happiness through chemicals -- these were just enablers, like Roman bread and circuses -- but the conditioning, since before birth, of each person to fill a pre-ordained role in society; in effect, the elimination of free will regarding one's lot in life. Thankfully, this nightmare is no closer today than it was in Huxley's time -- indeed, with Communism and the attendant evils of Stalinist-era collectivization all but dead, it's more remote than ever.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley starts off slow and uninteresting. All sorts of chemicals are named and the description of how the children of A.F. 632 are created and grow up. After the first three chapters, the real story starts and it becomes more interesting.

I did not like how later on in the story, John, a savage, was the main focus. I was hoping that the story would centre on Bernard the entire time. The idea was interesting as to why the world was created to its present state and the reasons why the new humans are told to live in a community. There is no such thing as marriage or seriousness in relationships. There is no such thing as aging or disease or pain over loss. There is great importance placed on how the children are raised to perform their assigned roles.

May contain spoilers:

It is a world in which humans are not born by mothers, but are created and grow up in the hatchery and conditioning centre. There are different casts to keep the world operating efficiently and keep everyone happy with their jobs. The higher castes are created to be more intelligent, while the lower castes are less intelligent.

Everyone is said to belong to everyone else, thus everyone is encouraged to sleep with as many people they desire. There is a drug called soma that everyone is greatly addicted to, which makes one imagine everything they desire without a headache.

The children are conditioned to have certain beliefs by having a speaker repeat the same lines numerous times for many years while they sleep. Solitude is discouraged, and only reference books are available to the public.

Lenina Crowne has been seeing only one man for the past few months and this behaviour is looked down upon, since promiscuity is encouraged. Bernard Marx, who works at the same place as Lenina, feels that people should not just sleep with anyone else without getting to know them better, because that is what children would do. Another employee is Helmholtz Watson, who feels like there is something missing from his life because he doesn't feel satisfied.

One day Bernard visits a savage reserve and meets John there. John is the child of a woman that was not born of a mother. Bernard becomes interested in John and wants to take him to the outside world. The story then focuses on John, the savage who is obsessed with Shakespeare, and how he reacts to the Brave New World.

With its vivid description of everyday activities such as the "feelie" movies and classification of every human into one of five letter and color groups, Huxley's Brave New World is a fun read for young adults and teens.

The Brave New World is a sort of Utopia, where humans are not born to mothers; they are bred in bottles and slowly travel by way of a huge conveyor belt through various machines during the gestational period. Those babies who will become astronauts spend a majority of time upside-down in the bottles, and those who will work in the jungles are submitted to a higher than normal temperature throughout the process. The embryos which are destined to be in one of the lower classes (Epsilons or Deltas) are purposefully deprived of oxygen so that they will not be "born" too intelligent for their class. In light of the current progressions that we have made with cloning and genetic alteration, it seems that Huxley has shown us one distinctly possible direction that society could wind up taking...

The book begins with a tour through the "decanting" factory.. recently fertilized eggs are artificially multiplied in the "Bokanovsky Process", which can create almost 100 identical embryos from a single egg. The lower classes will be multiplied to the highest degree, while the Alphas (the upper administrative class) will be individuals. The tour continues up to the nurseries where the children are conditioned every day to enjoy their lot in life. Some of this conditioning is done through aversion therapy, while some of it is drilled into the childrens' heads while they sleep. This sort of conditioning is what leads to a perfectly controlled world. (The controlled drug called Soma which is distributed faithfully to the masses doesn't hurt, either).

It is easy to determine which caste one person is in by the color they are wearing; each class wears a different color. The classes range from Alpha (highest) down to Beta, Gamma, Delta, and finally Epsilon. Deltas, for example, wear only khaki and are conditioned to hate books so that they will not waste their time reading. Betas, by contrast, are conditioned to be glad they're smart, but not as smart as Alphas because Alphas work too hard.

The older folks are so ingrained with these thoughts that they know nothing but happiness with their lives, regardless of whether they are the hard labor force or in one of the upper classes. However, the people in charge, as a result of knowing what is actually going on, can become a little bit jaded. When one "Alpha" decides to take a holiday, he sneaks off to a reservation of "savages" (folks who don't want any part of the Brave New World's society) and sees his illegitimate son. This is soon discovered, and he is brought forth before a committee which is shocked because they consider natural birth to be downright barbaric. The mother and son are brought into the "civilized" society, and everything quickly falls apart.

This book is fascinating in every way, from the colorful images that Huxley paints for the reader, to the parallels it draws to our current society. Brave New World is absolutely a must-read for anyone who is old enough to understand the implications, but try it for yourself! Pick up a copy! Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to the science fiction, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition" by Richard Perez, a fun, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.

The Great Idea that spawned this book is visionary and intelligent and hampered by Aldous Huxleys' ant-American ideals.I found that the first few chapters of the book consisted of the author trying(successfully though boringly)to persuade us of the world he was creating and at the same time trying (and failing dismally) to include storyline and character developement.The author was evidently an intelligent man with great ideas but I,personally, want more than that from my reads.Huxley was influenced by Ant-American friends and two 'trips'(not holidays) to America to confirm his suspicians about the 'New Power' taking the rest of us down the slippery slope of classless mass production.I say that AH was an intellectual,creatively barren,snob who cared more about maintaining his sheltered middle-class England and not about the lower classes.He also tried and failed to make it in Hollywood,the critics now say that he was 'too intelligent' for hollywood but,after reading BNW,I suspect he just wasn't creative enough-for all his great ideas and I suspect the resentment from being judged wanting by such a faction is a main reason for his political bent.

The novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is about an English utopian society in the future. The main characters are one of 96 clones just like themselves, and the novel guides the reader through their everyday lives. Huxley introduces some interesting concepts and ideas, but the text lacks flavor.

The tiresome novel slowly drags on discussing the differences between their culture and that of today. There is no distinct storyline to engulf the reader's desire turn the pages, and it has a dry personality. Huxley declines to develop his characters and they lack a certain realistic dimension.

There isn't an identifiable incline, climax or decline of the novel. Turning the pages is like drudging through a marshy swamp. Its dull continuation of information isn't intriguing, however the thought that this type of society may someday consume our world does open up the reader's mind to a shocking truth.

The novel is well written, but isn't recommended for people under the age of fifteen due to many adult topics and concepts within. It is directed toward people interested in expanding their imagination about possible future societies, but doesn't have the action and suspense to keep the pages turning, so don't be disappointed.

I think this book was not very captavating. It was very boring and put me to sleep every 5 minutes. It's a good bed time book!

This book contains so much of what I dislike in would-be literature. It's awash in generalities, blatantly didactic, guided by facile thought, caked with corny wordplay, and it displays no serious appreciation for language. It's not even an entertaining read.

When it comes to characterization, Huxley is like a cataractous portrait artist who paints with a mop and roller. The inhabitants of the "Brave New World" are daubed with such broad, dull strokes that they are essentially mannequins modeling ideas rather than clothes. No character exhibits more than a single character trait, and that trait is always a contrivance. "But this goes hand-in-hand with Huxley's message," you say. "He's trying to make a point." Ugh! Perhaps, but...

Like all dime-store artists and intellectuals, Huxley goes for the generic and general over the specific and particular. Huxley's sweeping generalizations capture none of the magic that makes each individual's experience so unique, complex, and interesting; rather, they reduce human experiences to miniscule variations on simplistic, generic, and monotonous themes. As William Blake emphatically declared, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot" --- this epithet fits Huxley to a "T".

But, of course, Huxley's muse traffics in pedantry, not poetry. And, without belaboring the point, Huxley's socio-political broodings are uniformly and embarrassingly obtuse; and, his prognostications are no more prophetic than those contained in any horoscope. Regardless, I don't care for socio-political theorizing in storybook form --- it is both intellectually and artistically lame.

Another warning: Huxley's penchant for linguistic costume jewelry will cause ardent lovers of language to wince repeatedly. Here is just one of Huxley's extended witlesscisms: "while our Ford was still on earth", "cleanliness is next to fordliness", "Oh, for Ford's sake". God, Lord, Ford (as in Henry) --- Get it! Get it! God help you if you're amused.

"Brave New World" is so asinine and inartistic that it almost works as a parody of didactic literature. "Brave New World Revisited" shows that Huxley was not kidding, though. That Huxley was serious about his sophomoric ideas and silly writing provides some unintended and tangential humor, but only very little. Somewhat funnier is the fact that this book winds up in many literary "lists" and "canons", which are themselves ridiculous, middlebrow gewgaws with slight and unintentional comic value. Final word: "Brave New World" is intellectually dull, artistically worthless, and more than a little kooky.

Highly recommended to those who vehemently disagree with me. Everyone else can safely skip it.

What puzzles me is why this book is so frequently quoted, like it is some kind of literary pearl. After having read it, I gotta say it feels like if Ayn Rand decided to re-make Candide. Which is to say it definitely isn't great literature. This plotless, uneven book is populated by drowning in bathos stick-figure characters that take their turns at barking out the author's rant. Maybe if it had been an essay, it would have been less unbearable, but as a novel the book is pathetic. As far as Huxley's being prophetic, well, first that adds nothing to its literary value, second, this is trivial, and lastly, Hillaire Belloc with his "Servile State" was ahead of Huxley by about twenty years (and he, appropriately made it an essay, not a half-a##ed novel brimming over with witticisms like "fordship" instead of "lordship". Phooey.)

Instead, I recommend to read Belloc's "Servile State" first, and then you will probably not want to bother with "Brave New World." The book's junk.

This boos is so weak, the narrative is so boring, thecharacters are so ridiculous and awkward, that I can't understand whatpeople saw in it. There's no climax, the plot is old cliche in the "science-fiction" (even being written in 1926) and people get saying that the book is "prophetic", "visionnaire".. Come on! IT is just boring. The end is laughable, the character who theoretically fights the organized civilization is also a "robot", because he only says what he read in Shakespeare. Blá!

I like books that show the corruption of society: You know the ones I’m talking about—“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or McCrae’s “Katzenjammer” which exposes corporate greed and New York City’s strageness. So I gravitated naturally to “Brave New World.” A sex-crazed world who thinks it's animal-like to have children naturally. I love the idea of a class system from the super-human double alpha plus to the grovelling Epsilon-Minus. And Soma, "a gramme is better than a damn." The freaky part about that drug is that something very similar to that now. And it doesn't make you happy, but sort of clueless, like an infant curious about the world. My favourite quote is from Benard Marx, as he refers to the way men talk about women, "As if they were a piece of meat."---showing just how bad society has gotten---and it has. And this is why I like Brave New World, even more so than 1984. Whereas Orwell warns of a totalitaranism based on perpetual war causing the poverty of a ration economy at home, Huxley examines a social control built on plenty or an illusion of plenty. One might then say that the works of these two men are opposite sides of the same coin in that Orwell's work is a warning against communist totalitarianism and Huxley's work warns us of a capitalist variant that is just as dangerous and certainly more relevant, at least to our own society.

Must also recommend: Jackson T. McCrae’s “Katzenjammer” which is VERY well-written, funny, disturbing, and informative.