Brave New World

• 1. Introduction

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  Brave New World is a dystopian novel by the English author Aldous Huxley, published in 1932. It is set in the year 2540. Its London has no mothers and no fathers. Citizens are produced in bottles, sorted into ranks before birth, and kept cheerful for life by sleep lessons and a drug. Huxley meant to make fun of a famous optimist, and yet the book he finished has kept readers arguing for decades. Why did a joke turn into a warning? What kind of society takes away family, grief and choice in exchange for comfort? And did readers ever understand which danger Huxley actually feared? The answers begin with a line Shakespeare gave to a young woman on an island.

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• 2. A Borrowed Phrase

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  The title comes from The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, where the young Miranda greets a group of visitors with wonder. Shakespeare meant her delight as irony. Her innocence keeps her from seeing that the newcomers on her island are wicked. Her father, Prospero, answers by observing that what looks new to her is simply new to her.

  Translators have often swapped the phrase for a local echo. The French edition is called Le Meilleur des mondes, which means The Best of All Worlds. That title points to an expression of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, which Voltaire mocked in Candide in 1759. A different route was taken in 1974, when the novelist Lily Hsueh and Aaron Jen-wang Hsueh produced the first Standard Chinese translation. They titled it Měilì Xīn Shìjiè, which means Beautiful New World, and they borrowed the wording of the Chinese Tempest.

  Inside the novel, the phrase is spoken by a young man who has read almost nothing but Shakespeare. His use of it grows steadily darker as the story goes on.

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• 3. From Parody to Warning

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  Huxley wrote Brave New World in the French town of Sanary-sur-Mer over four months, from May to August 1931. He was already a known name. He contributed to Vanity Fair and Vogue, had published a poetry collection called The Burning Wheel in 1916, and had written four satirical novels. Those were Crome Yellow in 1921, Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925 and Point Counter Point in 1928. This new book was his fifth novel and his first dystopia.

  The seed had been planted in Crome Yellow. In that book a character named Mr Scogan imagines vast state incubators. Rows upon rows of gravid bottles, he says, will supply the world with whatever population it needs. He adds that the family will disappear and that Eros will flit like a gay butterfly through a sunlit world. Huxley was picturing the future of Brave New World a decade early.

  The immediate spark was H. G. Wells. Huxley said the book began as a parody of Wells. He had in mind utopian novels such as A Modern Utopia from 1905 and Men Like Gods from 1923. In a letter to an American acquaintance, Mrs. Arthur Goldsmith, he admitted he had been having a little fun pulling the leg of H. G. Wells. Then, he wrote, he got caught up in the excitement of his own ideas. He called the result a negative utopia, and he took some inspiration from Wells's own The Sleeper Awakes and from the works of D. H. Lawrence. The scientific futurism is also believed to be borrowed from Daedalus by J. B. S. Haldane.

  Wells answered two years later with The Shape of Things to Come. In it, a reforming elite controls education worldwide and gradually produces a stable, egalitarian society. That rebuttal targeted an argument made by Huxley's Mustapha Mond. Mond claims that a society of only intelligent, assertive Alphas would tear itself apart. Wells even had later generations remember Huxley as a reactionary writer.

  Real events pushed the parody toward something grimmer. In 1931 Britain was in the Great Depression, with mass unemployment and the abandonment of the gold standard. Huxley concluded that stability was the primal and ultimate need if civilisation was to survive. Shortly before writing, he toured the Billingham Manufacturing Plant in north-east England, a technologically advanced factory owned by Sir Alfred Mond. It left a deep impression, and Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe, took his surname from the industrialist.

  An earlier trip to the United States supplied the book's mood. Huxley found Henry Ford's My Life and Work on the boat to North America. After leaving San Francisco he saw Ford's principles applied to everything around him. He was outraged by the youth culture, the commercial cheeriness, the sexual promiscuity and the inward-looking habits of many Americans. That outrage becomes the architecture of the society that comes next.

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• 4. The Bottled Society

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  In the novel's calendar, the year is AF 632, and the letters stand for After Ford. The count begins in AD 1908, when the first Model T came off Henry Ford's assembly line. The World State is built on the logic of that line: mass production, sameness, predictability and the steady buying of disposable goods. It has no religion based on the supernatural. Even so, Ford is revered as the founder of this world. Citizens celebrate Ford Day and swear by his name. Church crosses have had their tops cut off to become a T. The Christian Science Monitor carries on as The Fordian Science Monitor, and in England an Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury fills the role of the Archbishop.

  People here are manufactured in tiers. The castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, and each wears its own colour of clothing for easy identification. Embryos in bottles are treated with chemicals to suit their future work. Higher castes are optimised, while lower castes are made steadily more imperfect. Heat and cold are used too, chosen to match the career an embryo is destined for. The Bokanovsky Process makes up to 96 identical people from a single fertilised egg. It is thought to be named for Maurice Bokanowski, a French bureaucrat who believed in efficiency. Podsnap's Technique speeds up the maturing of eggs so that thousands of near-identical people can be produced.

  After birth, sleep does the rest. Recorded voices repeat slogans to sleeping children, a method the book calls hypnopaedia. They learn that their own caste is the best one, while other castes do necessary work. In the novel's own history, the method was discovered when a child named Reuben Rabinovitch memorised foreign-language speeches in his sleep. Later experiments showed that social attitudes sank in more easily than facts. Any unhappiness that survives is smoothed away by soma, a drug that is both an antidepressant and a hallucinogen. Huxley named it after the Vedic ritual drink, reflecting his interest in Indian mysticism.

  Small details show how thoroughly the system rewrites ordinary life. Women wear the Malthusian belt, a contraceptive device named for a movement of Huxley's day. The Malthusian League and similar groups were spreading through Europe. Thomas Malthus himself preferred abstinence to contraception. Seventy percent of women are freemartins, made sterile before birth. The state has only ten thousand surnames to share among two billion people. The man who explains the bargain is Mustapha Mond. He argues that art, literature and scientific freedom must be given up so that happiness can be maximised. His motto for the world is Community, Identity, Stability.

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• 5. The Savage and His Shakespeare

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  In a New Mexico village called Malpais, a young man named John grew up with two books. One was a scientific manual that his mother Linda kept. The other was the complete works of Shakespeare, left behind by a local man named Popé. Linda taught him to read from them. Ever after, he could voice his feelings only in Shakespeare's lines. He quoted The Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

  He is brought to London by Bernard Marx, a psychologist who works with sleep-learning. Bernard is an Alpha-Plus but short for his caste. An alleged accident with alcohol in his blood-surrogate, before he was decanted, is the explanation. He feels like a misfit. He is angry, jealous and sometimes cowardly, and he dislikes soma. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who is tired of composing propaganda doggerel. Bernard's loud criticism has made his boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, consider exiling him to Iceland. A holiday on the Savage Reservation with Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, seems to offer a way out.

  On the reservation Bernard meets Linda and John. Linda was once left behind there during a holiday, and she was pregnant by the same Director. When John calls the Director his father in front of a crowd, the room roars with laughter. The word is a vulgarity in the World State, because a child with a known parent is scandalous. The humiliated Director resigns before he can exile anyone.

  For a short time Bernard basks in the fame of owning a celebrity savage. The attention fades fast. Linda spends her days drugged on soma and dies, and Dr. Shaw had prescribed a dose that would stop her breathing within a month or two. John is horrified by a death handled without grief. He attacks a child during death-conditioning. Then he tries to stop a soma handout to Delta workers, which starts a riot. Police quell it with soma vapour. Lenina tries to seduce him, and he calls her an impudent strumpet.

  All three men are brought before Mond. Bernard begs for another chance, but Helmholtz welcomes exile and picks the Falkland Islands, hoping the bad weather will inspire his writing. Mond tells him that exile is a reward, because the islands hold the most interesting people in the world. Mond then sums up John's position as a demand for the right to be unhappy.

  John retreats to an abandoned hilltop lighthouse near the village of Puttenham, hoping to purify himself with whipping. A filmmaker named Darwin Bonaparte secretly films him, and the result, called The Savage of Surrey, becomes an international sensation. Helicopters bring reporters and crowds who demand a show. A woman implied to be Lenina steps out of one. John lashes at her in fury, and the crowd turns the scene into a soma-fuelled orgy. He wakes the next morning consumed by remorse, and by the evening the first arrivals find that he has hanged himself.

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• 6. Warnings Misread

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  A report by Leon Kass, an associate of President Bush, treats Brave New World as a warning about producing improved, perfect or post-human people. The geneticist Derek So says that reading is mistaken. He points out that the book contains no genetic testing, and that its methods rely on hormones and chemicals rather than heritable changes. The upper castes are cleverer because the lower ones are deliberately impaired, not because anyone is perfected. Huxley wrote before the structure of DNA was known. So concludes that Huxley feared totalitarianism far more than any specific biotechnology. Huxley himself, like his brother Julian, remained a committed eugenicist, and his family included several prominent biologists.

  The comparison that has lasted longer is with George Orwell. Huxley wrote to Orwell about Nineteen Eighty-Four and doubted that the policy of the boot on the face could continue forever. He expected rulers to find easier ways to satisfy their lust for power, such as suggesting people into loving their servitude. In 1985 the social critic Neil Postman set the two books side by side in the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death. His summary was blunt: "Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us." Christopher Hitchens made a related point in a 1999 article titled Why Americans Are Not Taught History. He noted that the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum in 1988, which he saw as the regime conceding its own extinction.

  Huxley kept revisiting the idea himself. In the foreword to a new edition in 1946, he said a rewrite would offer the Savage a third choice. That choice was a sane community with decentralised economics and cooperative politics. Then came Brave New World Revisited. Harper and Brothers published it in the United States in 1958, and Chatto and Windus in Britain in 1959. In it he asked whether the world had moved toward or away from his vision. He decided it was moving there much faster than he had imagined. He examined overpopulation, drugs and subliminal suggestion. Its tone is different, partly because Huxley had converted to Hindu Vedanta in between. His last novel, Island, appeared in 1962 and offers a utopian counterpart to the earlier book.

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• 7. Whose Idea Was It

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  Rose Macaulay published What Not: A Prophetic Comedy in 1918, picturing a future where people are ranked by intelligence and the state regulates procreation. Huxley moved in her literary circles and attended her weekly salons. That is one of several earlier works that have been set beside Brave New World.

  Bertrand Russell felt the novel owed a debt to his own 1931 book The Scientific Outlook. He told his publisher in a letter that Huxley's book was merely an expansion of two chapters of his. H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, from 1901, also shares ground with it. Its lunar society has specialised castes, new generations produced in vessels, and a caste decided before birth by tampering with the fetus. Individuals there are drugged down when they are not needed.

  The most famous dispute involves Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 novel We. George Orwell believed Brave New World was partly derived from it. In a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley said he wrote his book long before he had heard of We. According to Natasha Randall, a translator of We, Orwell thought Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said he cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World for Player Piano in 1952. He added that Huxley had done the same to We.

  A sharper accusation arrived in 1982 from the Polish author Antoni Smuszkiewicz. He pointed to two earlier novels by Mieczysław Smolarski, Miasto światłości from 1924 and Podróż poślubna pana Hamiltona from 1928. In an open letter to Huxley, he wrote that the similarities left no possibility of accidental analogy. Kate Lohnes of Encyclopædia Britannica offers a gentler reading. She sees the overlaps as expressions of shared fears about fast technological change among tech-skeptics of the early twentieth century.

  Other dystopias joined the conversation soon enough, including C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength in 1945.

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• 8. Banned and Adapted

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  Ireland banned Brave New World in 1932, the year it was published, for its language and for supposedly being anti-family and anti-religion. Challenges kept coming. In 1965 a Maryland English teacher claimed he was fired for assigning it, and he sued under the First Amendment. He lost his case and his appeal, because the court said the assignment was not the reason for his dismissal. India banned the book in 1967 and accused Huxley of being a pornographer. In 1980 it was removed from classrooms in Miller, Missouri. The edition of Brave New World Revisited published in China leaves out explicit mentions of China itself.

  The American Library Association lists complaints of insensitivity, offensive language, nudity, racism, drug use, conflict with a religious viewpoint and sexual content. The novel ranked third on the association's list of the most challenged books of 2010 and seventh in 2011. It also placed on the association's top one hundred challenged books for three decades. It stood at number 54 for 1990-1999, number 36 for 2000-2009, and number 26 for 2010-2019.

  Critics were divided at the start. Rebecca West called it the most accomplished novel Huxley had written so far. Joseph Needham praised it as a remarkable book, and Bertrand Russell admired his usual masterly skill. In the 4th of May 1935 issue of the Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton said Huxley was revolting against the Age of Utopias. In 1944 the economist Ludwig von Mises read it as irony aimed at socialism's dreamed paradise.

  Honours followed. In 1998-99 the Modern Library placed it fifth on its list of the 100 Best Novels in English of the twentieth century. Robert McCrum put it at number 53 on his top 100 greatest novels in The Observer in 2003. It ranked 87th in the BBC's The Big Read. BBC News included it among the 100 Most Inspiring Novels on the 5th of November 2019. In 2021 Royal Mail chose it as one of six classic science fiction novels by British authors for a set of postage stamps.

  Adaptations have been plentiful. CBS Radio Workshop broadcast a version on the 27th of January and the 3rd of February 1956. Bernard Herrmann wrote the music, and Huxley himself narrated. BBC Radio 4 aired it in May 2013 and again in 2016. Television films appeared in 1980, directed by Burt Brinckerhoff, and in 1998. A miniseries followed in 2010. The 1993 film Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock, is said to draw heavily on the book. A stage version by Dawn King, with music by These New Puritans, opened on the 4th of September 2015. In 2020 a series created by David Wiener premiered on the Peacock streaming service on the 15th of July. It was cancelled in October after a single season. In April 2022 Harper published Fred Fordham's graphic novel of the entire text.

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