I was struck on my recent science-fiction reading binge, how quickly that genre dates. With Brave New World I checked and rechecked the copyright date (1932) with disbelief, given it has television as a cultural force, (checking the Wiki, it says television was commercially available since the late 1920s), contraceptives as a part of life and many other touches that seem prescient and modern--and this totalitarian dystopia predates the rise of Hitler's Germany. I recently reread Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, and saw some similarities, especially how the totalitarian setting evolved from a pursuit of happiness--but Brave New World aged even better.
Huxley's world blends a critique of capitalism and communism both, a blend of a consumerist, sexually promiscuous, hedonistic pill-popping culture with mass production of human beings, conditioning from the cradle, and an abolition of homes, families, reminiscent of Plato's Republic. It's set in A.F. 632 (After Ford, as in Henry Ford) yet the prescribed surnames chosen by the state include Marx, Trotsky, etc. Given I had a Trotskyite political science professor who in all seriousness said approvingly she thought the only way to get rid of the "patriarchy" was to have the State take away children and raise them, the scenario in the book resonated with me.
The opening sentences immediately give you a sense of the world you're about to be immersed in:
A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability.
This impressed me stylistically. Great imagery, smoothly paced, this was a thought-provoking page-turner. The first half establishes the world thoroughly and imaginatively through a "normal" girl, Lenina Crowne, and someone a bit of an outsider, Bernard Marx. Then around half way through we're introduced to John Savage, a young man raised outside "civilization" in the "Savage Reservation" by a mother from their world accidentally stranded there--he's the perfect foil to their ordered world.
This book was fascinating, and if anything even more relevant than when it was published.
