Description

Brave New World

One of the two great classic dystopian novels, Brave New World is perhaps more relevant today than when it was written in 1931.

There were certainly elements of this book that author Aldous Huxley saw looming in the totalitarian regimes of the time, some already fully fledged and active, others such as Nazi Germany on the brink of power. But the world depicted in this book is even more prophetic – frighteningly so – for us today.

This is a world in which everyone is preconditioned to be happy with his or her place in society, whether you are an Alpha-Plus Mandarin or an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron. Only the Savages left in the few scattered reservations around the world still claim “the right to be unhappy”. This is a world where people are conditioned to consume from test-tube to crematorium, where everyone gets a daily ration of a drug called soma, where thinking is discouraged in a hedonistic miasma of sport, games, “feelies”, and compulsory promiscuity. After all,  everyone “belongs” to everyone else.

This book is a must read at some time in your life. And even more so today, as it becomes more and more like a world that is looking rather familiar.