Brave New World

I wanted to like this because it is very important to my son, but I am taking a break from the audible version. I think that reading over the print will be better. I will come back to this later when my daughter is reading it for school.

I liked this book! I am a big fan of science fiction and this one is a classic. It has an amazing world development however the story isn't really long nor special.

In this world, the industrial revolution took a big step into human evolution, also technology is more important than emotions and reproduction. Humans are all made artificially and society gives them a classification accordingly to their job status.

This book has a lot of interesting ethical questions and shows a world really similar to ours with some twists.

Most things being “mechanical” definitely still show the book's age and make it seem outdated. But the whole idea and concept behind “happiness” is still surprisingly relevant today. Everyone wants to be happy all the time, and that's what's eerie about this book. Makes you appreciate the dynamic of the ups and downs of life. I enjoyed this book!

7/10

Potato fingers! Impudent strumpet!

This was an incredible read. I feel fundamentally changed (over-exaggeration?). It was heaps of description and exposition, but I have to hand it to dear old Aldous for all the points raised in the chapter where Helmholtz, John and Bernard meet with Mustapha and Mustapha gives the low down on why this society is the way it is - why sacrifice is an enormous part of how we live our lives and how this society just happened to sacrifice truth, beauty and passion.

Pretty heavy stuff. But told in such an incredibly engaging way (imagine reading this as a thesis?).

Read this after listening to Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) speak on the Tim Ferriss Podcast - definitely worth a listen. His philosophy about where the world is going and the threats to humankind are eerily linked to Brave New World - which he addresses as a major inspiration.

Also big ups to Aldous for such incredible use of Shakespeare. So many lines from his text make more sense to me now lol
peace

This book hasn't aged well. It may be one of the first cases of a dystopian novel, but the author's imagination doesn't stretch much further than that. A lot of his points are very on the nose, and the final chapters repeat them, just in case the reader has made it this far without figuring out the message. Would not recommend, but for some reason it still gets assigned in school.

Another example of the story being much better than the book.

Well...
First time I've read this. Interesting. Better than I expected.
Also not as good as I expected :-D I'm not too fond of Aldous Huxley's writing style.
I also experience it as pretty racist.
I don't understand John's thinking.

Everyone should read this during this current plandemic experiment. It's rather prophetic. Keep acquiescing and this might just be where we're headed.

Masks? Pffft. That's just the beginning.

???One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.???
~The whole book can be summed up in this one line.

Checkout this brilliant comic strip explaining this very phenomenon :
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Have started and put down this book two times. Paired it up with the audio book recorded by Steve Parker. Third time's the charm eh?
Here's the link to the first chapter, complete with sound effects :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc2wHvdW4QA

Reading/ listening to dystopia during a pandemic just hits different.
Huxley brilliantly weaves a Utopian world during the first few chapters of the book.
A world without conflict. A world where everyone's happy, and everyone belongs to everyone else.

Solves all the problems, right?



As the chapters unfold however, we see the grave injustices being carried out against those who are none the wiser. Slowly and steadily the author takes us through the murky past, mixing Shakespeare in between. (I know, that was a nice surprise)
Absolutely loved reading the chapters where the “civilized” citizens visited the “savage” citizens and the conversations with the controller.

A must read, for every dystopia lover or otherwise.

It's hard to believe this book was initially written in 1932. Given the current state of society as we know it, we are heading towards this vision of the future like a runaway train. This is one of those books I've had on my “to read” list for literally decades, and now I see why so many people hold this up as a classic of literature.

“People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.”

If you want to read something to give to perspective about the current world, society, rules. Give this book a try.

An interesting prediction of a totalitarian, classist, capitalist future. It's hard to accept a possible fascist future for the US that includes the complete abandonment of any sense of puritanical dogma and the patriarchal family unit and instead has a liberated sexual culture. Apparently a new show came out for this but it wasn't very good. They say this is among the top 100 greatest books of all time. Given my complete disinterest in reading fiction, I will abstain from commenting on this accolade. And I will abstain from recommending/not recommending either book in this category for that reason.

Where to start... I liked this I did, I mean I gave it 4 stars so I must have really enjoyed it. I do typically love a good dystopian and this being a classic example I'm surprised it took me so long to get around to reading it!

I really did enjoy the world building on this and learning of this future society which is really most of the book. The plot is fairly simple and a little weird at the end for me. Some have said this book is boring and I can agree with that, but I personally often like books that are “boring”. It's a weird taste of mine.

All in all, I did enjoy this but couldn't give it a 5 stars because to me it's not nearly as good as 1984 by Orwell. Sorry Huxley.

Exceptional!!

In Orwell's 1984, it is sadness and hate that are the themes of the book - what with never-ending wars, children ratting out their parents for perceived treason, and nothing being sacred. Sprinkled with a plot which is amazing on its own merit, the result is a spectacular novel which is spellbinding.
In extreme contrast comes Huxley with his magnum opus ‘Brave New World' - where happiness and satisfaction form the lingering themes of the book - the result is surprisingly still a dystopia.
The goal of pursuing happiness and satisfaction with Huxley's work, to the neglect of everything else, leads to a dystopia that functions on hypnopaedia (sleep conditioning so that no ‘impure thoughts' develop), meaningless entertainment (responding to conditioned stimuli rather than your own subjective tastes), meaningless promiscuity (in fact, people trying to practice monogamy are outcasts), and a meaningless existence (supply and demand are both manufactured, and solitude is actively discouraged). The addition of a good plot would have made it a deserving classic - right now, it looks like I just read a postgraduate dissertation of an aspiring anthropologist.
TL;DR - no less horrifying than Orwell's masterpiece, this is an extremely important read. For all the media screaming that our world is 1984, our world is much closer to Huxley's vision than we dare to think of.

Rating : 2.5

I wanted to like this book I really did. And in fact, I actually did for the first half of it. The premise of the book and the dystopian setting were highly promising but then the execution was poorly done and the closure was extremely bland.

The characters promised to have some kind of depth when introduced but ended up not having any. I ended up feeling extremely unattached to all them and couldn't feel any kind of empathy towards them.

Mustapha Mond promised to be an extremely interesting character. The confrontation between him and John at the end of the book reminded me of the confrontation between Winston and O'brien in part 3 of 1984. But in Brave New World, the confrontation s nothing but a showoff of the wit of the character with smart phrases that end up adding nothing interesting to the story. We don't discover anything new about Mustapha or the Society, nor does it add any value to John's character development.

Lenina's character to me is the blandest, her existance in the book is nothing but a cheap trigger for John's breakdown, which leads us to the weakest point of the whole book; the closure.

The closure of the book, in my opinion, is nothing more but a shock value. It only prooves to me a lack of ideas of where to go with the story.

In the end, I could only see similarities to 1984 but, unlike 1984, the book is poorly executed and lacks depth and a proper closure.

After an intro to Huxley's world of genetic and social engineering. A ‘savage' is tossed into it, only to find he doesn't belong.

(Minor spoilers) This book is about two things: individuality and civilisation.The characters are all caricatures of what it means to possess social individuality. In broader terms, to be different to those around you. Bernard is different because he's on the bottom rung of his caste, a rung that no one knew existed until he showed up. He is rejected because his individualised traits do not cohere with the rest of the caste that a part of. Helmholtz's difference is his superiority, an ubermensch amongst the elite. He's above everyone else. For Helmholtz, success is trivial, women are trivial, life is trivial; his place in society means little to him and so he has become aloof, rejecting comformity to his caste in favour of radical misbehaviour. John is different because he has no caste at all. He's and outsider to almost everyone's social circle, a true pariah. He's too white and civilised to be an Indian yet too emotional and unstable to be considered civilian. That same civilisation then took his mother from him, poisoned his moral purity and, in the end, refused to let him escape its grasp. Lenina, in fact, has no individuality at all. She is the perfect Alpha - beautiful, brainless, adamant in her pursuit of orthodoxy. Her suffering arises when John forces individuality upon her through his exclusive infatuation of her – and then rejects her scripted advances, undermining the stability upon which her conditioning rests. It is through Lenina that we glimpse the dire consequence of removing individuality in favour of stability, pruning the autoimmunity that individuality gives. Mustapha Mond parenthetically tells us that difference is suffering. Ironically, Mond is perhaps the most individualistic person in the book, and paradoxically its happiest. Why? Because Mond isn't actually different; because he is his own caste, his own comparison, his own society. He reads what he likes, dictates what he likes, declares his own morality – by his own admittance, he makes the rules. In a sense, he is beyond society. The illustration Aldous Huxley has painted for us is one of status anxiety, a critical feature of our modern world. It is what drives consumerism. It is what makes us jealous and angry at the success of others, and ashamed of our own failures. But what is failure without a comparison to success? Alain de Botton's [b: Status Anxiety 23425 Status Anxiety Alain de Botton https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1298417783s/23425.jpg 14280288] deals with this topic better than I ever could. In 1930, Aldous Huxley would have been aware of the rise of communism and the future it could promise. This book is in many ways a critique of that communism. The Brave New World is pointedly similar to how many people at the time described the ultimate outcome of successful communism – both the detractors and pundits; utopia and dystopia. Everything is easy, everyone is happy; to each what they need, with needs regulated closely. What Huxley truly felt about communism is best illustrated in the Cyprus experiment, perhaps. Is this book really dystopian, or is it utopian? What would Bentham have to say about the satisfied Alpha-Socrates, alongside the satisfied Gamma-Pigs? In 2019, a lot of the world that Huxley envisioned seems right around the corner. Designer babies, powerful escapist drugs made ubiquitous, paternalistic governments, insatiable consumerism...the list goes on. But the real lesson on offer in this book has been seemingly ignored: do we really want a world where individualism and its instability, its sturm-und-drang and emotional labour, has been replaced with happiness, easiness, and perhaps most jarringly of all, equality?

An extraordinary book that I have nothing to say about that hasn't already been said. I give the book in its entirety 4 stars, but the extraordinary Controller v. Savage debates deserve an entire star.

Well... this didn't age well. The beginning was good and the description of the new world was very nice and fascinating, but the plot itself is pretty thin. The characters are underdeveloped and mostly caricatures. Also, some parts of the book are overlong almost tempting me to skip parts, because I could already foresee what was going to happen several pages in advance.

This book is not easy to review due to the complex and multifaceted nature of its narrative allowing a wide range of interpretations. It also doesn't help that Huxley himself had changed the aim of the story during the process of creating it. I can't blame him; 1920s and 30s were quite a turbulent time.

My opinion of the book shifted a lot while reading it, swinging from “a timeless masterpiece” to “a dated antic” at times. By the end of the day, I do think the book is marvelous, even if some aspects of it are a bit old-fashioned for our early 21st century society.

You are emerged into a dystopian society with a prominent caste system where people are conditioned from their very conception to fulfil a pre-destined social role. Some are raised to be successful public figures, others - simple factory workers. There are certain rules of what the populace are supposed to like and what they're not, the entertainment and culture are heavily censored, and at the core of the social values are consumerism and promiscuity.

We do get a character who represents “the old ways”, whose morals and ideals are juxtaposed against the ones of the world at large, but the key brilliance of this book is that it doesn't necessarily tell you that one is better than the other. If anything, I personally got a feeling that both are equally terrible, yet have their own advantages. One offers social stability, the other - closeness to nature, but both constrict you to certain social rules and punish insubordination. The old-world people of New Mexico seem to be even more cruel, or, as David Bradshaw writes in his 1993 Introduction to Brave New World, “John and Linda's ostracism amids the racial prejudice of Malpais [...] is far more intolerable than the predicament of Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson in the World State.”

I also found it interesting that the character who is supposed to represent Edwardian morals treats others terribly. He claims the people of the New World to be unhappy and morally bankrupt, but he's the one who's miserable and violent.

Among the things I didn't like were certain characters, who were nasty enough to ruin some of my enjoyment. They are, nonetheless, necessary, I think, even if I hated them. I'm also still not sure how I feel about including sleeping with multiple partners into the notion of dystopia. It annoyed me greatly at first, but then I had a conversation with my boyfriend and he had a good point - perhaps Huxley didn't necessarily oppose the idea. It was enough that it was shocking to the Edwardian society and different from the moral norms of the time.

All in all this book is definitely a worthwhile read, and the three introductions included in the edition I own, as well as Huxley's biography, really add to the overall enjoyment of it.

No sé por qué no me había dado el tiempo de leer este libro... Sin duda una distopía más que se añade a mi lista de favoritos. A pesar de que le tomó un buen par de páginas llegar a la trama esencial, la descripción del mundo “perfecto” es increíblemente certera a lo que se asemejaría una realidad similar. Lo único decepcionante es el desarrollo de los personajes, el cual, a mi parecer, no alcanzó un climax a la altura del problema que se manifiesta.

Like an earthquake, except the shaking is of our imagination and principles.
It is very hard to put a finger on what exactly is wrong in this book, because everything orbits around happiness, positive thoughts and well-being. But inside you, it wakes up the voice that needs to utter “this is wrong” at every page. I often felt blocked in trying to justify why this or that was wrong. The only hope to find is in the “savage” character that seems to be the link with our real world. He is brought to the fantasy land and feels uncomfortable in it. He was the only character with which I could fraternize in the whole book, and ironically he is called by the others as “the savage”. This is a difficult book, not in the sense that it's hard to read, but it's full of hard to swallow bits, morally challenging and very likely to generate disgust or contempt in some situations. Though I totally recommend it, just to make us aware of what is possible when people allow themselves to go too far.