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.