Brave New World
The dystopia where everyone is happy and that is the horror. Huxley's vision of pleasure as control is more relevant with every passing decade.
The World State
Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel imagines a future where human beings are decanted rather than born, conditioned from childhood to love their assigned roles, and kept docile by a happiness drug called soma. Bernard Marx feels vaguely dissatisfied with paradise. When he and the pneumatic Lenina visit a Savage Reservation and bring back John, a man raised on Shakespeare and real human feeling, the collision between raw humanity and engineered bliss tears everything apart. The novel is the counterpoint to 1984. One warns of a boot on a face; the other warns of a hand offering a pill.
Reading Brave New World
Unease
/
Chapter
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
"Aldous Huxley · Brave New World
Huxley wrote the novel in four months in 1931 as a parody of the utopian novels of H.G. Wells. He later said he had not meant it to be taken as seriously as it was, but kept returning to its themes for the rest of his life.
Huxley wrote a follow-up essay in 1958 called Brave New World Revisited in which he argued, with alarm, that his fictional predictions were coming true faster than he had imagined they would.