![]() There was mass unemployment and changes to the currency in Britain, leading to a lot of uncertainty. ![]() This is a metaphor for capitalism, sexism, racism, and basically every other power structure you can think of (in case it wasn’t obvious).Īround the time he started to write Brave New World, Huxley was really freaked out by the Great Depression (1931). Epsilons (the lower caste) are the giants, and the Alphas (highest caste) stand on their shoulders – without Epsilons, the “utopian” society would collapse. ![]() Citizens of the Brave New World (called the “World State”) are engineered in artificial wombs, indoctrinated as children into predetermined castes, and kept calm with the constant use of a drug they call “soma”. Huxley wrote it himself, and his main message seems to be: “a writer should never feel remorse for the mistakes they made in their books and it’s no use trying to go back to fix them, but I could totally fix all the problems in Brave New World if I wanted to, and here’s exactly how I’d do it…”īrave New World was published in 1931, and set 600 years in the future from then (so, the year 2540 to us, or the year 632 “After Ford” for the characters). The foreword in this edition is pretty weird. Brave New World was essentially the Black Mirror of the 1930s. He originally intended the book to be a satire, a “negative utopia” sending up all the novels that implied humanity could solve all of its social and economic issues with science.īut then, as Huxley later wrote to a friend, the author “got caught up in the excitement of own ideas”, and he ended up creating an entirely dystopian future where developments in reproductive technologies and psychological theories (sleep-learning, classic conditioning, etc.) have turned society on its head… and not necessarily in a good way. Huxley always maintained that Brave New World was actually inspired by the utopian novels of H.G. There was some beef between the authors when Orwell accused Huxley of ripping off his plot (Orwell believed it was just a bit too similar to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin). (If you’re brave enough to use an affiliate link on this page to make a purchase, you’ll send a new commission my way – thank you!)īrave New World is kind of like 1984’s homely cousin.
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