Sunday, January 16, 2011

CBR-III Review #1: A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley


Somehow, despite most people having read A Brave New World in high school, this book has passed me by.   Which is a little strange, considering how much I like a good dystopian novel; And this book is an extremely good dystopian novel.  It is equal parts predictive and disturbing.   Although humans (well, at least the Alphas of Huxley’s vision) may not be flying around in individualized helicopters anytime soon, it is easy to imagine a world in which most humans work in a mundane repetitive job during working hours and numb themselves after the working day is done.  In fact, even without a daily ration of Soma, that is practically speaking, what a significant portion of the population do on their own; through alcohol, drugs (either or both prescription and non-prescription) and television or some combination of all three.   And the thought of a genetically engineered caste system put in place to maintain social order isn't such a far-fetched view of the possible lengths a government may go to in order to ensure control.      

The most disturbing scenes to read in the novel were the ones where the Savage, John, has what equates to a series of nervous breakdowns as he tries to reconcile the ideals of human feelings and emotion, gleaned form Shakespeare no less, with what he sees in the “civilized” society.   As he progresses through the novel he has an ever greater difficultly reconciling his ideals with his new reality.  And as his illusions about the great society that his mother described to him are dissolved one by one and his ideals about himself and his own emotions are shattered, he reaches a breaking point.  And that is the most truly disturbing point the book has to make.  That possibly in the future, society will reach a point, where the population is too great and resources so few, that conforming without critical thinking will become a necessity in order to keep humanity as a whole intact.



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