Brave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written.
I have been searching for a short summary about this book but it seems impossible, this book is not that simple to explain. Click Read More below to skip the summary because I know this summary is quite long, I tried to shorten it as much as I could. This is a summary of the book:
Brave New World opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future ("After Ford"). Human life has been almost entirely industrialized — controlled by a few people at the top of a World State.
In BNW, genetic engineering isn't used straightforwardly to pre-code happiness. Instead, it underwrites the subordination and inferiority of the lower orders. In essence, Brave New World is a global caste society. Social stratification is institutionalized in a five-way genetic split. There is no social mobility. Alphas invariably rule, Epsilons invariably toil. Genetic differences are reinforced by systematic conditioning.
Brave New World there is no war, poverty or crime. Society is stratified by genetically-predestined caste. Intellectually superior Alphas are the top-dogs. Servile, purposely brain-damaged Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom. The lower orders are necessary in BNW because Alphas - even soma-fuelled Alphas - could allegedly never be happy doing menial jobs. In any case, our descendants are likely to automate menial drudgery out of existence; that's what robots are for.
Brave New World is a "Fordist" utopia based on production and consumption. In our own society, taking drugs may compromise a person's work-role. Procuring illicit drugs may divert the user from an orthodox consumer life-style. This is because the immediate rewards to be gained from even trashy recreational euphoriants are more intense than the buzz derived from acquiring more consumer fripperies. In BNW, however, the production and consumption of manufactured goods is (somehow) harmoniously integrated with a life-style of drugs-and-sex. Its inhabitants are given no time for spiritual contemplation. Solitude is discouraged.
BNW is an essentially loveless society. Both romantic love and love of family are taboo. The family itself has been abolished throughout the civilized world. We learn, however, that the priggish Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning was guilty of an indiscretion with a Beta-minus when visiting the Reservation twenty years ago. When John the Savage falls on his knees and greets him as "my father", the director puts his hands over his ears. In vain, he tries to shut out the obscene word. He is embarrassed. Publicly humiliated, he then flees the room. Pantomime scenes like this - amusing but fanciful - contribute to our sense that a regime of universal well-being would entail our losing something precious. Utopian happiness, we are led to believe, is built on sacrifice: the loss of love, science, art and religion. Authentic paradise-engineering, by contrast, can enhance them all; not a bad payoff.
This reading was a requirement at my school, and most books we get are not so interesting. I was not too excited to read the book because I heard from students that the book was strange and inappropriate. They were right, the book was weird and it talked quite a bit about sex but I loved it. I loved the book, it reminded me a bit of Divergent by Veronica Roth and the British television show, Doctor Who. Two of my favorite things, I love how Huxley imagined the future.
In the book Huxley invented words which made it difficult to sometimes understand the text. The book was quite a page turner. I plan to read the book again because I feel I may have missed something I did not catch the first t ime I read it.