I’m not a fan of science fiction or dystopian novels, but this may be my favorite of that category, perhaps because it was written in 1930, so the diction is charming.
The setting is a successful communist society, in that no one is starving and there is perfect societal stability, through scientific advances and social engineering. The people are “happy,” or simply conditioned and soma-fied to believe so. In the higher (i.e. more intelligent) castes, wherein the people are still able to exercise some amount of self determination, there is minor dissatisfaction with instant gratification. The old way of life continues among the Indians, who still practice religion, self denial, and chastity, drink alcohol, and get into fights, and poor John the savage is an outsider in both worlds.
The characters are mostly flat, or should I say, pneumatic, but that’s exactly how they ought to be when they don’t have an original thought to their name, because it’s been conditioned out of them. The setting operates as the interesting character in this novel, and the true characters are simply there to explain the theory behind the society, perhaps a bit plainly.
My instinct is to call Huxley a genius for predicting the rise of casual sex, self-sedation through recreational drug use, secularism, sensationalism, communalization of children, and pursuit of trivial pleasures one hundred years ago, but perhaps he was simply observant throughout the roaring twenties and only imagined the most extreme version of such a society or made the safe bet that it was a trend that would continue, because pleasure-seeking is bound to be popular and only get easier with technology. The characters engage in a long discussion about the trade off of freedom, virtue, and religion for social stability and satiation, and it seems to me John has the better part of the argument, because he has been able to feel true feeling and can compare that to the superficiality of the brave new world, but I wonder, do some people read this book and think that if we could create this sort of society, we should?