Brave New World Revisited

Aldous Huxley

1958 • 131 pages

Ratings18

Average rating4

"Huxley uses his erudite knowledge of human relations to compare our actual world with his prophetic fantasy of 1931. It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time." — New York Times Book Review When Aldous Huxley wrote his famous novel Brave New World, he did so with the belief that the dystopian world he created was a true possibility given the direction of the social, political and economic world order. Written more than twenty-five years later, Brave New World Revisited is a re-evaluation of his predictions based on the changes he witnessed over that time. In this twelve-part work of nonfiction, one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late.

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Quinn Tenorio

I took a utopian studies class in college where we read an excerpt from this book. I decided to read the full book and it was about what I was expecting. While it was great to get Huxley's view on utopia/dystopia, I felt like the story suffered from unexpected pivots from the story. However, given that the entire point of the book is the exploration of utopia (and other topics) it's easy to go along with the story.

January 24, 2022

Kiara

The book kept my interest for the first half of the book. Their were parts in the second half of the book that became boring and repetitive but it is probably due to the style of the writer.
The author does make you think of certain topics in which sex is for pleasure only because you are not encouraged to have a long lasting relationship. Women are still viewed as meat and their is the superiority of certain groups over others. The caste system and the cloning is presented here as a substitute of the abolition of the nuclear family and individuality.
In a letter that Huxley wrote to Orwell after the he read 1984 sent to him by the author himself, Huxley wrote some interesting things to Huxley:” My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World :”Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

February 26, 2022