Brave New World: A Dystopian Vision of a Technologically Controlled Society

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in about four months, between May and August of 1931, while living in Sanary-sur-Mer on the French Mediterranean coast (Wikipedia). Chatto & Windus published it in London in February 1932. Ireland banned it that same year, and the arguments over it have not let up since: school boards, courts, library lists, television producers and political commentators have all taken a turn.

The premise fits in a sentence. A society has solved suffering by engineering it out of existence, and the rest of the book tallies what that solution costs.

Four Months in the South of France

Huxley, who lived from 1894 to 1963, had bought a house at Cap de la Gorguette, between Sanary and Bandol, in 1930. A local mason misspelled the name when it was painted, which is how it became Villa Huley. He wrote the novel there in roughly four months, and the family stayed in Sanary for seven years in all, leaving for the United States in 1937 (Sanary Tourisme).

The title comes from Miranda’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, where she greets a shipload of strangers with “O brave new world.” Wikipedia’s account is that Shakespeare meant the line ironically. Huxley’s use of it is just as dry.

Critics split on arrival. Rebecca West called it “the most accomplished novel Huxley has yet written”, and Joseph Needham and Bertrand Russell praised it as well, while other contemporary reviewers responded negatively.

A World Run on Conditioning

The story opens in London in the year AF 632. “AF” stands for After Ford: the World State counts its years from 1908, when the first Model T appeared, and the date works out to AD 2540. Babies are not born. They are produced in a hatchery and sorted into five castes, Alpha through Epsilon. Bokanovsky’s Process turns a single fertilised egg into as many as ninety-six identical people. Sleep-teaching, or hypnopaedia, plays slogans to children through the night until the slogans pass for their own thoughts. And when any of that fails to soothe, there is soma, a drug whose name Huxley took from a Vedic ritual drink.

Bernard Marx, a psychologist at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, is an Alpha-Plus who does not fit. His friend Helmholtz Watson is a writer and lecturer; Lenina Crowne, a Beta, works in the hatchery. The outsider is John, raised on the Malpais reservation outside the World State by his mother Linda, a woman left behind there by the Director of Hatcheries, who turns out to be John’s father. John grows up on Shakespeare. Brought to London, he becomes a curiosity.

Midway through, the novel stops being a story for a while. Bernard, Helmholtz and John are summoned before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, and what follows is a debate.

Writing desk by an open shuttered window overlooking the Mediterranean coast

The Right to Be Unhappy

That debate, in Chapter 17, is where the book makes its case. Mond defends the World State without apology: the castes, the conditioning, the drug, the loss of anything that might leave a person unsettled. John wants precisely what has been abolished. He asks for God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness and sin, and Mond sums the list up for him. John accepts the summary.

“I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

(John the Savage, Chapter 17 — full chapter text)

The line lands because Mond has not lost the argument. A society that has removed distress is hard to dismiss on its own terms, and Huxley gives its Controller the best material available. Nobody in the World State is mistreated, exactly. They are never given the chance to want anything the system cannot supply, and so dissent has nothing to attach to.

Technology in the novel is rarely malicious. Genetic sorting, conditioning and drugs are tools of comfort, applied in the name of stability, which is why the book reads less like a warning about machines than about what people will trade for being looked after.

Huxley Against Orwell

Neil Postman set the two great dystopias side by side in his foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Orwell’s nightmare, in his reading, is the censor; Huxley’s is the shrug. Where one author feared a state hiding the truth, the other feared this:

“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

(Neil Postman, foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death)

Huxley did not treat the book as finished. In a foreword written in 1946, he said that if he were to rewrite it he would offer a third alternative, somewhere between a utopia of control and a primitive life, and he called it sanity. As it stood, the novel offered readers a choice between two bad options. In Brave New World Revisited (1958), he concluded that the world was heading toward the society he had imagined much faster than he had expected (Wikipedia).

Huxley on Camera, 1958

Mike Wallace interviewed Huxley in 1958, the same year Revisited appeared. The full interview is below, in a third-party YouTube upload. In The Marginalian’s 2012 write-up of it, Huxley is quoted urging that “it’s extremely important, here and now, to start thinking about these problems.” He was speaking about propaganda and the future of technology, with the novel more than twenty-five years old.

Vast futuristic hatchery hall with endless rows of identical glass bottles

Two TV Films and a Cancelled Series

The screen adaptations have come mostly from television. A 1980 television film was directed by Burt Brinckerhoff, and a second, in 1998, by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams. The most recent, a series developed by David Wiener, premiered on Peacock on July 15, 2020, with Alden Ehrenreich as John, Jessica Brown Findlay as Lenina, Harry Lloyd as Bernard and Demi Moore in the recurring role of Linda.

Peacock cancelled it on October 28, 2020, after one season of nine episodes, the streaming service’s first major series cancellation (Wikipedia). Reviews were mixed: a 46 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 56 reviews, and a Metacritic average of 55 out of 100. Some critics praised the modern setting and the performances. Others found the show short on depth.

Bans and Challenges

Ireland banned the book in 1932 over its language and what officials considered its anti-family and anti-religious content. In 1965, a Maryland English teacher said he had been fired for assigning it; the courts ruled against him in Parker v. Board of Education. India banned it in 1967, with Huxley accused of being a pornographer, and in 1980 it was removed from classrooms in Miller, Missouri.

The American Library Association’s lists of most-challenged books have carried it ever since, ranked 54th for 1990–1999, 36th for 2000–2009 and 26th for 2010–2019, with a third-place finish in 2010 and a seventh in 2011 (Wikipedia). Each wave of complaints has gone after roughly the same material: sex, drugs and a disregard for religion. Those are the things the World State uses to keep its citizens quiet, and the things the book is arguing against.

What Holds Up and What Doesn’t

The case for the novel rests on its first two-thirds: the hatchery tour, the slogans, the way the World State’s citizens say appalling things in the language of good manners. The ideas have aged better than the specifics. Nobody is buying a drug called soma, but the idea of comfort as a method of control is easy to find in current arguments about screens, feeds and the attention economy.

The case against comes partly from Huxley himself, who within fifteen years thought the book’s choice of futures too stark. A fair complaint of another kind is that Bernard, Lenina and Helmholtz sometimes behave less like people than like positions in an argument, and that the long conversation in Chapter 17, wonderful as it is, arrives in the voice of a lecture. The book is more persuasive as an argument than as a story. For a work built to be argued with, that may be the right trade.

Worn leather-bound volume of Shakespeare on a weathered wooden table

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does the title come from?
From Miranda’s line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, which Wikipedia says Shakespeare meant ironically.

What does “AF 632” mean?
After Ford. The World State dates its calendar from 1908, the year of the first Model T, so AF 632 corresponds to AD 2540.

Is Brave New World a banned book?
It has been banned or removed in several places, including Ireland in 1932 and India in 1967, and it has been challenged repeatedly in American schools. It also appears on the American Library Association’s lists of most-challenged books.

How does it differ from 1984?
Postman’s shorthand is the clearest: Orwell feared control through pain and concealment, Huxley through pleasure and distraction. In 1984 the state forces its citizens to obey. In Brave New World, they are conditioned to want what the state wants.

Did Huxley write a follow-up?
Yes, Brave New World Revisited in 1958, in which he concluded that the world was moving toward his vision faster than he had expected.

Where to Read It

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited: this Harper Perennial Modern Classics volume pairs the 1932 novel with Huxley’s 1958 follow-up. See it on Amazon (affiliate link)

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Further Reading

For the author in his own voice, The Marginalian collects Maria Popova’s 2012 write-up of the Mike Wallace interview, and Postman’s foreword remains the best short comparison of Huxley and Orwell.

Two independent readers worth a look: Ms. Buff, who tries to reread the novel every couple of years and credits Huxley with “the best characters to illustrate his vision of a possible future”, and a student writer at .MUSE who finds that “Huxley was clearly ahead of his time.” Both are favorable; neither is a dissent.

More from the same shelf: the review of Animal Farm and the review of Fahrenheit 451.

Sources

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