To put restrictions on sex is as silly as putting restrictions on which chair to sit. And like chairs, women are meant to be pneumatic. Wonderfully pneumatic. Why should modern man have to put up with it? Any informed person will affirm it is gross: all meat and blood and pain. Science will solve this problem with advances in reproductive technology: thinking outside the box.
Foster, "out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention. If you've been to a supermarket you will have seen plenty of bad parenting. How often have you wanted to step in and rectify the situation? Let's take the important job of citizen building out of the hands of amateurs. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children her children … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, "My baby, my baby," over and over again.
This is something we all want. Yet we must contend with traffic jams, lost cellphones, and raised voices. The frustration you feel is the result of a chemical reaction in your brain. Thus it is only natural that Science should offer a chemical solution. The problem here is not death per se. It is our poor attitude toward it.
Rigorous psychology will help us achieve complete indifference and thus free up a lot of wasted time. Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry—as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! These are only needed for reference and factual information. Reading in itself is profoundly antisocial. And, although there is little danger of anyone actually reading Shakespeare, his works are especially egregious in provoking time wasting thoughts.
Gaffney, "contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. The absurdity of religion is self-evident, as every nonconforming individual knows. If there must be faith, let it be bright. Let it be in science. One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Love is the unifying idea in each of the above themes - certainly the most destructive concept ever to exist.
Shakespeare of course has been largely responsible for its glorification. Brave New World is a world without pain, without hunger, with total comfort. It is a world without love. This type of reading is challenging for me. It hurts my brain!!!!
Embryos were divided by their social status. Everybody must get stoned. How am I doing? Am I understanding this book somewhat? It looked scary in Aldous Huxley! View all 44 comments.
Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? The worship of material goods, the embracement of capitalism, the promiscuity, the growing ambivalence towards books, the self-medication to escape reality, and the overall vacuousness of people, in general. The book begins rather awkwardly in the lab where people are being created. A massive, industrial, test tube baby factory with very little variety, after all, they have determined the very best specimens so why create anything else?
Note to self: rewatch the movie Gattaca. We do meet Lenina in the lab, an uncommonly pretty woman, who feels a pat on a fanny by her supervisor is a reassurance that all is well. Note to self: metoo movement needs a time machine. Huxley read a book on Henry Ford, who was certainly the poster child for industry and capitalism. In this book, he has become a deity of sorts.
Note to self: Start using Ford for Fuck and see if anyone has a clue where such a use of the word came from. We want them to like the new ones. Fortunately, by using brainwashing techniques while everyone sleeps, they can implant the proper desires and prejudices that will make for a united and happy society. Lenina has become hung up on a guy by the name of Henry Foster. She is dangerously close to being accused of monogamy.
Sex has become a plaything to keep the masses happy. They also have soma, which is the ultimate happy pill. Anytime things become too real, they pop a tab of soma or three.
It feels more than a bit like the opioid epidemic that we are struggling with currently; only soma is made readily available to all who need it and seems to have been carefully manufactured to avoid overdoses. Overdoses would definitely be a downer that would create some of that much feared unhappiness.
Bernard Marx has been trying to get Lenina to do something with him for some time. He is a bit of an odd duck among these carefully designed people.
A Danny Devito among a herd of Arnold Schwarzeneggers. Note to self: Rewatch Twins , just because it is such a hoot. There is much speculation that something went wrong in the lab, a bit too much of this or too little of that leaked into his test tube. Needless to say, he is testy about it. After all, why does he look like this while his siblings look like that? He finally convinces Lenina to go with him to an Indian reservation in America, where they meet the natives who have been untouched by technology.
They get old. They get sick. They die young. They give birth. This is a povertyporn trip similar to white westerns driving through African villages so they can point and say things like Bernard is there really to feel something. Lenina is there to become overcome by all the squalor and unfamiliar feelings of discomfort, but she is glad she came because she is going to rock her Facebook page when she gets back. Bernard decides to bring a white Savage back with him. The Savage is reading, not only reading, but reading Shakespeare.
Can you imagine a person learning to read from Shakesepeare being integrated into an uneducated society such as this? Note to self: Read Othello.
The Savage is primitive and a thinker, and this will prove to be a dangerous combination. He will see the absurdity in everything. He will protest violently I had forgotten about all the humor in the book. Huxley is poking fun at nearly everything we hold sacred. Satire is the perfect vehicle for modern comedians like John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Bill Maher to make their political points and make their audience laugh as well.
We seem to need our truths given to us with a dose of sugar. Even in this futuristic utopia, Huxley called it a negative utopia, the population still needs healthy doses of soma to keep up the pretense that everything is fine. The people who rebel are those who find integration to be a problem or, like Bernard, feel disadvantages from the very beginning of their life. One size does not fit all, even when everyone is manufactured to be the same.
A society will always be judged by the tolerance it shows for those different than the majority. View all 28 comments. Mar 02, Nataliya rated it liked it Shelves: reads.
Brave New World is a classic written to make its readers uncomfortable. It accomplishes its point well. Still, it is only getting 3 stars from me, as I rate books based on my personal level of enjoyment rather than literary value. The characters of this book were not meant to be likeable - I am fine with that concept. The first few chapters made me want to curl up in the corner and cry - that's how repulsive the design of this universe was mission accomplished, Mr.
But as we plunge int Brave New World is a classic written to make its readers uncomfortable. But as we plunge into the depths of the neverending moral message of the story basically the entire last third of the book , I felt my patience stretching thin. I get the message, no need to beat me over the head with it.
I did chuckle at the ridiculous consumerism of this world inspired by America of the turn of the century in which, unexpectedly, most characters have distinct socialist names - Lenina, Trotsky, Marx, Bernard as in G. I just think it's funny how both of the enemies of Huxley's ideal world - the competing ideologies of socialism and rampant consumerism - were dealt with in one blow.
Good try - but come on! I liked the description of the effects of soma drug on the mind. No wonder, as this was written by the author of The Doors of Perception about mescaline effects on the mind - an interesting read, by the way.
Of the classic trio of dystopian books this one, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Zamyatin's We this one is my least favorite We is the best, in my opinion, and may have actually inspired this one. Brave New World succeeds at portraying dystopia at its worst and making the reader think, but stilted language and moral heavy-handedness take away from the enjoyment. Yet it's a classic, and should be read, even if not for fun. View all 19 comments. I think I read it wrong.
Because my first thought upon finishing this was this: Where the hell do I sign up for this Brave New World? Basically, this society is missing religion, shame, sin, misery, fear, disease, and classic books. Now, that's not to say life is perfect in this utopia. Nobody gets married and has kids anymore. I know, a lot of you are thinking that isn't quite the downside that the book thinks it is. No more monogamy? Whatever would we do? The new people are grown in test tu I think I read it wrong.
The new people are grown in test tubes. There are the dumb ones who do the menial shit, the average ones who do the office stuff, and the smarter ones who run the show. Can you imagine if people were actually set up to be in charge by nothing more than a coincidence of birth? That's some crazy sci-fi caste shenanigans right there. So what we have here is job security, free drugs that don't have side effects and make you feel good, non-judgemental sex, no conflict, no health issues till you die, and no barky religious folks knocking on your door at 9 am on a Saturday.
And what are you missing out on, pray tell? I've read his stuff, and I can say without a doubt that I could skip it and make do with a Micheal Bay movie. Fair warning, no one has ever accused me of being someone they aspire to emulate. Even the evil overlord in charge of it all wasn't that bad of a dude. When these guys met him and confronted him with their doubts as to how well they actually enjoyed their place in society, he just sent them to an island full of like-minded individuals so they could do what they wanted without disrupting the flow of things.
He was kind of like, yeah, this isn't for everyone and sent them off with a wave of his chill hand. For the entire book, I kept waiting for the Soylent Green is People moment, but it never really came. To me, that world did not appear worse than ours in any significant way. The only weird thing was that being a mother or father was shameful and no one was monogamous.
That's not exactly the most horrifying thing I've ever heard happening in a dystopian novel. Especially if the other option is to be like John, who flogged himself every time he got a boner over cute little Lenina. I kept waiting for some sort of redemption arc for this savage wherein he stopped being a complete asshat, but that didn't happen.
He was creepy as fuck right up till the end. And what an ending it was. Once there, he prays to some weird mash-up of Christian and Native American gods, flogs himself daily, and tries his darndest to make his life as hard and unbearable as he can.
Because suffering for no reason whatsoever is what makes life good? Bottom line, he's so batshit that tourists start showing up at his doorstep to watch him act the fool. But it's not till Lenina gets there and tries to embrace him that he loses his damn mind.
He tries to attack her with his nasty little flogger and when he doesn't succeed, he just starts beating the fuck out of himself. And if that wasn't weird enough, he AND all the tourists end up getting turned on by his self-flagellation and have a massive orgy. John wakes up after his night of debauchery, can't deal with having busted a nut, and hangs himself.
The end. I'm still not sure what the moral of the story is here. Now, admittedly, I like the sound of the drugs and sex and fun holidays. I will say I think it was a bit of overkill to taze babies. Then again, sacrifices must be made for the greater good. I'm kidding!
Don't zap toddlers, you idiot. At the end of the day, I didn't really care for this book. I personally thought it was sort of boring. Not much happened plotwise and I never really felt invested in any of the characters. It seemed to me a bit of a daffy book that had a lot of fuckwit ideas of what would happen if we ignore the strict moral codes about sex found in most religions.
I know this is a beloved novel and I don't think you're stupid if you enjoyed it. Different strokes for different folks and all that. Michael York was the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, and I thought he did a fantastic job. Jun 25, Lisa rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-to-read-before-you-die. History, " he repeated slowly, "is bunk. As I had forgotten the major plot of this dystopian novel written just when fascism emerged in the s, some fifteen years before the nuclear age, "You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk.
As I had forgotten the major plot of this dystopian novel written just when fascism emerged in the s, some fifteen years before the nuclear age, I spent a day rereading it with mixed emotions.
Some things are almost prophetic in all their scary details, for example the efficiency of the childlike custom-made contributor to consumerist society: "Adults intellectually and during working hours", he went on.
The part of the plot I found difficult to swallow was the juxtaposition of the scientifically perfected "utopia" of drug-induced happiness with the dirty "natural" world of the savages, who follow absurdly ancient rituals. Their world, where "god" is still needed to balance their suffering and to help them accept ageing, hunger and pain, is like a black-and-white contrast foil.
Their need for self-denial in God-fearing doesn't generally differ much from the self-indulgence of the consumption society where soma takes care of controlling emotions and actions.
In either case, human beings are controlled, or conditioned, by a greater power, and they can fall back into a state of irresponsible acceptance of pleasure or pain, according to their choice - which of course is pre-destined by early childhood drilling.
Call me a hopeless idealist, but there is a third alternative! Human beings can be offered the freedom of choice if they learn to embrace diversity, knowledge and differences of individuals rather than the "utopian" goal of "sameness" of one kind or the other. If sameness is the ultimate goal, any paradise will turn into hell, an automatic regression into robotic behaviour will follow, regardless of the oppressive dictatorship that imposes it consumerism and religious doctrine are quite the same in Brave New World.
Interestingly, Huxley himself commented on the problematic binary world he had created when he reflected on his novel in His third option, to decentralise power and encourage individual freedom, is still a work in progress in our historical bunk era, and his two dystopian visions have merged into one. The worship of His Fordship, the consumerist god of the capitalist world, has been combined with ancient religious rites serving as soma for some people, while others take the more direct approach of over-consumption of food and fun and drug intake against meaninglessness.
It made me think of another novel showing two juxtaposed oppressive systems, Things Fall Apart. British colonial rule, with all its religious and social implications, stands against the ancient rites of the Nigerian past, which to me would constitute just as much of a dictatorship against my personal wishes.
Two opposing, rigid systems leaving no individual freedom, two doctrines that condemn whatever is different from their own specific tradition. Zero tolerance for individual differences. No compromise or combination possible. It is either or. No third or fourth option. Margaret Atwood in her MaddAddam at least insisted that her new deity "Oh Fuck" should only be called upon in emergencies. I finish reading Brave New World with the feeling that it is time to call on Atwood's god, for the bravest and newest of worlds is in danger.
The devil is in the sameness, as is god. For they are the same thing, utopia and dystopia being completely identical, turning humans into Epsilon Semi-Morons, children or robots.
Even Shakespeare can be destroyed by application in banal situations. If history is bunk, everything is always new and brave. But also meaningless. Oh Fuck! View all 23 comments. Dec 20, Dan Schwent rated it really liked it Shelves: books , In a dystopian society of genetically engineered consumers pacified by drugs and conditioning, Bernard Marx cannot seem to fit in. When he visits a Savage reservation, his eyes are opened and he brings one of the savages back to England with him As I continue my bleak science fiction parade toward the new year, I wonder why I've never read Brave New World before.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley takes on consumerism, the media, genetic engineering, recreational drugs, religion, herd mentality, In a dystopian society of genetically engineered consumers pacified by drugs and conditioning, Bernard Marx cannot seem to fit in. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley takes on consumerism, the media, genetic engineering, recreational drugs, religion, herd mentality, individualism, and lots of other socially relevant topics, weaving them into a science fiction setting that our world resembles more every day.
The setting and society are the stars of the show in Brave New World. The people live in a caste system based on genetics, conditioned from birth and pacified by drugs, living to consume goods and take soma to forget their troubles. Free love is encouraged but free thinking is not. Bernard Max can't seem to get with the program and winds up nearly causing a revolution. The characters are pretty secondary to the setting but it wasn't hard to feel sorry for Bernard, the square peg in a world of round holes.
Even when he gets a measure of fame, he still can't manage to shake the feeling that something's wrong. John the Savage provides a nice contrast, an outsider looking in on a world everyone else sees as normal but he sees as hellish. Huxley may not have thought so at the time but he may have been a futurist. Our culture seems to be moving in the direction of Brave New World all the time. The rampant consumerism, lowest common denominator entertainment, and herd mentality all seem a little too familiar.
Is the internet our soma? Things to ponder There are some classics that are as hard to read as an insurance policy written in Klingon and then there are ones like this. Brave New World is very readable and not at all dense. The ideas are very easy to absorb, especially in this day and age. In these uncertain times, Brave New World is as timely as ever.
Four and a half stars. View all 20 comments. View all 3 comments. Mar 30, Kaylin The Re-Read Queen rated it did not like it Shelves: didn-t-finish , unpopular-opinions , classics , dystopia. I'm a peabrain pleb and this is truly a classic and how dare I? I understand what it's trying to do. I understand the over-enthusiasm for science and the depersonalization. I understand how showing a thriving world devoid of relationships and emotions feels counterintuitive and wrong.
I understand how ground-breaking this was. I understand it raises all sorts of questions and opens discussions about free will, societal control, the role of government and what humanity is. But it's not for me. This is incredibly dense as the entire first half has been dedicated to showing the science and structure of this 'brave new world. I mean kinda? It all feels dedicated to driving the same few points home.
I understand. But I'm bored. In his last major work, Island, published in , Huxley describes a doomed utopia called Pala that serves as a contrast to his earlier vision of dystopia. Huxley died on November 22, , in Los Angeles. Brave New World belongs to the genre of utopian literature. A utopia is an imaginary society organized to create ideal conditions for human beings, eliminating hatred, pain, neglect, and all of the other evils of the world. Sometimes the societies described are meant to represent the perfect society, but sometimes utopias are created to satirize existing societies, or simply to speculate about what life might be like under different conditions.
In the s, just before Brave New World was written, a number of bitterly satirical novels were written to describe the horrors of a planned or totalitarian society.
The societies they describe are called dystopias, places where things are badly awry. Either term, utopia or dystopia, could correctly be used to describe Brave New World. Ace your assignments with our guide to Brave New World!
SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Why are Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson friends? Why does John quote Shakespeare? What is soma?
How are the castes different? What are the sexual norms of the World State? Why are Lenina and Bernard attracted to and repelled by each other? Caitrin Keiper. And not our notions of the future only: our notions of the past as well. For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history. Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times?
But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century — what would be the use of that? Erotic experimentation begins at six or eight years old. Economically, the society has subscribed so thoroughly to mass consumerism that the consumers themselves have been commodified. An unholy alliance of industrial capitalist, fascist, communist, psychoanalytic, and pseudo-scientific ideologies has brought about the end of history.
There is no pain, deformity, crime, anguish, or social discontent. Even death has no more sting: Children are acclimatized to the death palaces from the age of eighteen months, encouraged to poke around and eat chocolate creams while the dying are ushered into oblivion on soma, watching sports and pornography on television. Postmortem, the useful chemicals in every corpse are recovered in cremation to be used as fertilizer. When Bernard and Lenina, a couple of hatchery employees, travel on vacation to one such reservation in New Mexico, their Siddhartha-like encounter with age, disease, and death ends in a remarkable discovery.
One member of their civilization, left behind some twenty years before, has borne a son and raised him on the reservation. Bernard and Lenina take the woman and her grown son back to London.
How beauteous mankind is! Retreating to a solitary haven, he is soon found out; in a blaze of torture and disgust, he and his ideals collapse in freakish self-destruction. Lenina, who despite all her conditioning can dimly feel a yearning for the other, greater world John tried to show her, is destroyed with him.
The critical reception of Brave New World was largely chilly. Most reviewers were disgruntled or disgusted with what they saw as unjustified alarmism. Wells was downright offended. Wells is often considered the father of science fiction. His long train of novels predicted, among other things, tanks, aerial warfare, and the atomic bomb; as J. You damned fools.
Men Like Gods is the story of a group of contemporary Englishmen accidentally transported into an alternate dimension of peaceful, passionless Utopians who are uncritically committed to scientific rationalism and the self-negating collectivist state. Huxley thought this vision preposterous. Zamyatin, the Russian editor of H.
His works were banned and he was arrested several times, and finally moved permanently to Paris in First released in English in , We was not officially published in Russian until under glasnost. Some critics suggested Huxley had borrowed from or been heavily influenced by We.
And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate. The review by poet and novelist L. Huxley has been born too late. Seventy years ago, the great powers of his mind would have been anchored to some mighty certitude, or to some equally mighty scientific denial of a certitude.
Today he searches heaven and earth for a Commandment, but searches in vain: and the lack of it reduces him, metaphorically speaking, to a man standing beside a midden, shuddering and holding his nose. Unfortunately, what gives the biologist a sardonic smile as he reads it, is the fact that the biology is perfectly right.
Huxley came from a famously scientific family. He was the grandson of the biologist T. Aldous Huxley was also sometime friends with J. Haldane and Bertrand Russell, who debated the future of scientific and technological progress in a exchange of essays the subject of a recent exegesis in these pages by Charles T. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear — society, sapped at its very base, will have to find a new foundation: and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.
He welcomed the advent of behaviorism, founded by experimental psychologist John B. The psychological conditioning techniques in Brave New World are similar to experiments Watson had performed in real life, using loud noises and electric shocks to induce arbitrary fear into his subjects. Huxley, of course, sees so clearly what the psychologists do not see, that such a world must give up not only war, but also spiritual conflicts of any kind, not only superstition, but also religion, not only literary criticism but also great creative art of whatever kind, not only economic chaos, but also all the beauty of the old traditional things, not only the hard and ugly parts of ethics, but the tender and beautiful parts too.
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