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How odd for Aldous Huxley to serve as the
messenger who legitimized sci-fi as a serious
literary pursuit. Brave New World, written in 1931
and published the following year, was Huxley’s fifth
novel. His previous work revealed a knack for
satirical tales focusing on the aimlessness of “lost
generation” bohemians—an unlikely
apprenticeship for a would-be
master of conceptual fiction. And Huxley’s
own family connections, as grandson of
“Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley
and kin to many scientists, would seem to
make him an unlikely Cassandra warning
about a science-based dystopia of the
future.
True, there were some hints at what was
to come. Mr. Scogan, a character in
Crome Yellow predicts that an
“impersonal generation” of the future
will take social engineering to a new
height: “In vast state incubators, rows
upon rows of gravid bottles will supply
the world with the population it requires.
The family system will disappear; society,
sapped at its very base, will have to find new
foundations; and Eros, beautifully and
irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from
flower to flower through a sunlit world.”
Brave New World had its impetus in Huxley’s
reaction to H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods, an
egregious work of utopian fantasizing, in which
socialism solves everything from bad English
weather (allowing everyone to wander around in
the buff) to pesky germs. But, in an odd reverse of
the closing scenario from War of the Worlds,
visitors from real world industrialized Britain bring
some contagion with them to this collectivist
heaven, and need to be quarantined. (But at least,
Wells exempted them from the purge trials—but,
then again, he was writing in 1923 not 1938.)
Huxley considered writing a parody of this novel.
But though the end result of his efforts runs
counter to the naive optimism of Wells, it lacks the
piquant flavor of parody.
No doubt other concerns worked their way into his
book. The now long-standing British anxiety over
creeping Americanism had been spurred by Huxley’
s reading a book by Henry Ford. Hence Brave New
World begins in the “Year of Our Ford 632”
(equivalent to 2540 AD)—an encouraging sign
perhaps for current-day shareholders in the Detroit
automaker. Mass production permeates society,
perhaps most surprisingly in the birthing and
raising children, activities that now take place in
Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres. Sex is
liberated from the needs of reproduction, and thus
becomes a leisure activity, along with recreational
drug use. People go to the “Feelies”—a sensory
experience like Cinerama on steroids—the way
Huxley’s generation went to the “talkies.” Instead
of Dostoevsky’s “Everyone is responsible for
everyone and everything,” we have the maxim
"Everyone belongs to everyone else"—phrases that
sound similar enough, but in fact lead in
diametrically opposed directions.
This all sounds quaintly egalitarian, but a rigid
caste system underpins the society of 2540. When
our protagonist Bernard, an alpha plus male, brings
back two “natives”—John “The Savage” (yes, it
does sound like a great name for a TV wrestler) and
his mother Linda—from a trip to New Mexico,
where pre-scientific ways still exist as tourist
entertainments, it first creates a pleasant stir in a
bored society. But ultimately all three find
themselves out of synch with this hyper-planned
and pleasure-driven world of the future.
Is this book still relevant today? When Huxley re-
evaluated the subject in his Brave New World
Revisited in 1958, he determined that his vision of
the future was not only correct, but that events
were moving toward it faster than he had
anticipated.
A half century more has elapsed, and what have
they taught us? Science obsessed with usurping
reproduction via expansive technologies? Attempt
to use the educational system as a tool of thought
control? Drug use and sex as recreational
activities? The replacement of slogans for
independent thinking? A creeping mindlessness
permeating all aspects of society? Do these have
any bearing on our current situation? Well, just
read the newspapers and find out for yourselves.
Whoops, I forgot, those boring old print papers are
going out of business. Heck, bugger it all . . . let’s go
to the Feelies instead.
| [kuhn-SEP-choo-uhl FIK-shuhn] Noun: Storytelling raised to a higher degree through artful reconfiguration of the reader's conception of reality. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Reviewed by Ted Gioia |