About Brave New World

Post 1986:

This book is nearly a hundred years old. Scary, some of the prognostications. Dystopian fiction isn’t my favorite genre, but when it’s good—yeah. There are some fantastic passages in this short novel that test your brain and provide insights into the human condition, including but not only our need to experience pain and hardship in order to experience love and beauty and connection.

I forgot about the beginning, and it’s been a while. Not an easy first thirty pages. For me, at least. It’s this endless sequence of processes for making people. Huxley goes into tedious, strenuous detail how humans are bred in the future. Add a little of this, you get these types. A little of that, they’ll be taller or whatever. Lots of tubes and chemicals.

It’s interesting, I suppose, but explaining how humans are conditioned is where it picks up. One thing… if people are genetically engineered so methodically, why do some question the society? In my own dystopian novel, I explained my reason. So I’m better than Huxley.

Hey, I write fiction.

I’ll say this. Perhaps no other novel starts and ends so differently. The beginning is cold, industrial, inhuman, sterile, unfeeling, and frankly, boring. The ending is agonizing, human, emotional, tragic, and utterly and completely human.

I think it’s one of the great endings, starting right after John’s mother dies. The scene with the Controller is fantastic, and though it’s something like a Platonic symposia dialectic, it’s really smart stuff that doesn’t get too preachy. Lots of profundity and wit, and also an opportunity to be impressed with a guy who predicted much about entertainment and human conditioning.

Huxley might’ve been a better thinker than a writer. Still damn good. I’d say a bit too much world building and not enough character work to be one of my favorites, but it hits when it’s supposed to. Warning. You might need drugs after reading. That’s a joke—because of the book—don’t do drugs.

Be brave. Cheers and see after.