Brave New World

Dull in the beginning, but it picked up the pace around halfway through the book. Many people had recommended this to me claiming it was a more accurate representation of our current world than Orwell's “1984”. I agree with them to an extent, however it did not leave quite the impression that Orwell's masterpiece had on my mind.

Oh wow. Where do I begin with my review? I'm always amazed at how current a book written in 1931 can be so current and readable nearly a century later in 2018.

The Brave New World is set in a future some centuries away where happiness is society's key. Religion, art, science and truth have been sacrificed to archive global sustainable happiness.

People are engineered from embryo though constant tweaking at the fertilisation process and growth, then though as children conditioned using Pavlovian techniques: you read a book, you get zapped - aged 18 months. Aged 6 the children engage in “erotic play”. Sleep hypnosis with rhymes that the individuals will live inside society with. Each individual is predestined for a class in society: alphas, betas, down to the “epsilon semi-morons” - button pushers.

All seemingly pretty grotesque, but much later in the book, the benefits of this new world are argued, and it's a fairly convincing argument. Everything is for the sake of happiness.

Ignorance is bliss. The less truth there is to be sought, the more content you are with your reality. And thus, a stable, sustainable, healthy society.

—

It seems as through there's three protagonist with increasing complexity to break the orthodox rules of the New World.

Lenina allows herself to romanticise being with one person, and feeling love, but this is surface-deep and she's still very much a slave to her conditioning and unable to see beyond these walls.

Bernard Marx, an Alpha plus who appears visibly as a Delta, with nasty rumours that alcohol had been slipped into his fertilisation process. He is able to think and speak outside of his orthodox conditioning but when it comes to acting, he falls short, and in fact proves himself more of a coward (or in fact probably as most would act: though inaction).

John (the) Savage is different. He has a mother. He's learnt of God, learned to read and reads Shakespeare. He was born an outcast in The Old World (The Savage Reserve), and brought into the New World when Bernard and Lenina stumble upon him and his mother (originally from the new world but became injured and lost in the reservation some 20 years prior).

John is the only one who questions and tries to change the new world that he now lives, and, obviously fails. The new world is centuries in the making.

John is relatable because he comes from our time. And this is why he's a man out of time.

There's nothing he can do to change society in an impactful way, and even if he did, it would be at the sacrifice of happiness of others.

It's almost an inevitability that he goes mad. That he doesn't survive this brave new world. He can't. He can't escape it, and so, in the end, like any good Shakespeare tragedy, he tries and fails to extract himself from society, as it's impossible, in a rage of madness, goes on to kill the woman he loves, and then himself.

An amazing, and maddening tale. Wow.

There are some classics that make me wonder why they're regarded as such. This is one of those books. Dull characters, weak plot, and forced world building galore.

Admirável Mundo Novo de Aldous Huxley é um clássico provocador de reflexção sobre a sociedade atual, e apesar de a obra já ter mais de oitenta anos ainda prova estar atual.
Tal como no Admirável Mundo Novo, cada vez mais vezes a simplificação de prazeres e da arte, são raros os artes da “alta arte” e os que existem parecem estar pouco preocupados com o mundo. Para lá disso a nossa sociedade conta até com um falso intelctualismo baseado em obras de arte superficiais.
A facilidade com que os humanos do mundo de Huxley obtêm prazer pode ser equiparada à progressiva felicidade e facilidade que todos nós temos no mundo, mesmo que não seja plena. Assim retiramos que um mundo melhor para nós tem de envolver desafio e a alta arte, desafio e o pensamento. Desafio este emocional e fisico. É claro que quando se trata de desafio emocional não se propõe o completo oposto da destopia de Huxley, que é representado pelo mesmo como o momento de autoflagelação do selvagem, mas sim o desafio emocional de não escaparmos às nossas emoções como as personagens de Huxley fazem com soma, uma drogra potente que faz as pessoas felizes e esquecerem seus problemas.

read this one in high school, didn't realize I'd never rated.

Dou 3 estrelas por ser um clássico...foi uma leitura que fui arrastando sem saber se o motivo é porque o livro é chato (as personagens não me cativaram) ou porque não é o meu género literário favorito.

Wow. What a book?!! More chillingly relevant than ever before. It fizzes and pops with ideas and theories surrounding morality, religion, genetic engineering and socio-political agendas. It manages to subvert the current way we view the world and changes the perception of what modernity really means. I have so many things to express about this novel that I haven't enough space on this platform to discuss. But read it! Everyone read it! A more subtle dystopian that will resonate, terrify, unnerve and fascinate. Phenomenal. Just read it!

When I started reading Brave New World, I couldn't figure out why we were made to read it in school; it seemed a middling sci-fi novel, at best. From a discussion standpoint, things really pick up when John is taken from the reservation and introduced to "civilisation." Now that I've finished re-reading it, I like it even less than I did last time—not at all, in fact—but at least I understand why we read it in school.

Me gustó, pero quizas por la epoca en que fue escrito la narracion se me hizo muy simple, los desenlaces muy poco desarrollados, los personajes poco creibles. Quizas fue una lectura revolucionaria en su momento pero ahora no me sorprendió.

“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.”

Incredibly thought provoking.
Still relevant today, even though it would seem that 1984 got it a bit closer.

A compelling work of science fiction.

The dangers of an all powerful state: Community, Identity, Stability

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. The title derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:[4]

O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't.— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206

Set in London in the year AD 2540 (632 A.F.—”After Ford”—in the book), the novel anticipates future developments. It considers productive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning. These all combine to change society.

This dystopia sees a World Government which controls people's lives. This starts from the moment of conception to the moment of death. The authorities create fetuses artificial fertilization in test tubes. “Parents”are unknown and there are rigid divisions and castes in society. Each caste performs different functions. Whispered messages teach sleeping babies to be content, telling them to comply. This conditions people to accept their place in society. The Government distributes a ‘happiness' drug, soma. This gives the population an artificial sense of freedom . Only a few individuals dare to question society. Into this society comes a ‘Savage'. Rescued from one of the few places in the world which allows people to live under natural conditions. What will be the fate of the Savage and the two brilliant young men who dare to befriend him? Will the Savage succeed in retaining the ideal of freedom that his childhood taught him? And if he does, what price will he pay?

The World Controller for Europe, Mustapha Mond, explains that these control methods benefit society. He explains that they ensure happiness and stability. And it is true that society in this ‘brave new world' is both happy and stable. The lower castes' restricted abilities, ambitions and desires make them contented with their lot. There is no dissatisfaction. This is because all caste members receives the same workload, food, housing, and soma ration. Nor is there any desire to change caste. The conditioning reinforces the individual's place in the caste system. The upper castes (with a few exceptions) revel in the hedonistic and materialistic lifestyle provided for them.

People enjoy perfect health and youthfulness until death at age 60. Death is not feared. The population is confident that everyone is happy, and since there are no families, there are no strong ties to mourn.

Huxley does not make the naive mistake of idealizing a life that is not controlled by science. John, the Savage, who brought up on an American Indian reservation, lived a life that was in many ways uncomfortable and unpleasant. But Huxley makes the point that he had free will. In this fictional future free will and individuality are sacrificed in deference to social stability. So, free will is something which the inhabitants of the brave new world don't have. Huxley thus poses the reader with a question. Is free will and the freedom to choose, worth the suffering that goes with it? And it is this question that this book explores. John has extensive knowledge of Shakespeare's works. This serves him in several ways:

- he can verbalise his own complex emotions and reactions
- it provides him with a framework from which to critise the World State values, and
- it gives him language that allows him to hold his own against the rhetorical skills of Mustapha Mond.

I also noticed that blindness and vision are motifs that Huxley uses a lot in this book. For example, the creation of complex entertainment machines. These generate meaningless leisure and high amounts of consumption. In this way the Consumer Society is used to define individual happiness. A society where immediate gratification equates happiness to economic growth and prosperity. Thus it becomes clear that there is an inequality between truth and authentic, genuine happiness.

In closing, the book questions just how much we are all seduced into unthinking obedience. How our infantile behaviours are encouraged. How conditioning, social reinforcement, and soma (Christianity without tears) supports capitalist economics.

O brave new world that has such people in it.

I listened to the BBC Radio 4 version. Available here.

Episode 1 explores the dystopian world which enforces eugenics, promiscuity and happiness. Episode 2 asks can John the Savage remain true to the values he learnt on the primitive reservation?

Superb, with wit, humour and a dark underlying message: that a future totalitarianism is far more likely to take the form of stupefying propagandisation than the brutality of, say, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

So messed up. So relatable.

An interesting commentary on human development and behavior. Are you truly happy if you have never experienced pain or sadness in comparison? What does it mean to be an individual in a society where no one is ever alone? I hope the world never comes to this!

4.5/5 estrelas

Review completa no blogue: http://avidadelyne.blogspot.com/2016/01/book-review-admiravel-mundo-novo.html

Este livro tem muito que se lhe diga.

One of the first dystopian classics, it has a lot to say. It points out all the stupidities of our lives - at one point, the Controller says they chose happiness over high art, which is why they have no understanding of Othello's or other Shakespearean's plays - from which the title was taken, btw; The tempest.
It brings out empty sex, no institutions (everyone works and belongs to everyone else), no sickness or old age, no passion or individuality. It is mentioned that castes were necessary - that a group of Alphas solely extinguished themselves, because nobody would accept lower status - and that consumerism rules society.
My reason to give it 3 instead of 4 stars is exclusively the narrative, which I find lacking. orwell, for instance, had me hooked much faster. But then again, it might just be because I'm conditioned...

The story was so disturbing to me that I couldn't just listen to several hours at a go, I had to do short chunks. But lessons and wisdom and interesting perspectives. Mind widening with a crowbar!

Quest for classic scifi!

Interesting take on making a society obedient, controlled and predictable.

I now know where soma.fm got its name from!

Well, I wanted to read this because I quite like the dystopia type theme. It's not really that it was a bad book, but more that I couldn't help but laugh at some parts of it. It reminded me a lot of when you were a child and you wrote a story about the future. The images I had in my head were exactly how I might have illustrated that story written by a child. Saying that, as unbelievable as I found it, it's a frightening reminder of the contrast between certain ‘worlds' that are present in our world today and the ignorance of millions about how different life is for many from our technologically saturated world. This was the first book I've ever read that I predicted the ending, which I purposely try to avoid doing when reading if it seems predictable but this one was unavoidable. But at least I can tick it off as read now!

And interesting new world...

I would rank this a 3.5 if I could, but honestly... it was good but not great.

In truth this book deserves both 2 star and 4 star ratings; of course they must only be bestowed upon certain parts of the book on either side. Hence, my 3 star rating.

This book was very easy to read and starts with an explosion into a vivid an different world. Unfortunately I feel this went from a 4.5 star book to a 3.5 star book over the course of the book as I don't feel that the amazing world created wasn't used to it's full potential.

Saying that I still enjoyed this quick read.

Хороший рассказ. Читается на одном дыхании, хотя герои немного непродуманные + смазанная концовка. Конечно, не 1984, но неплохая попытка рассказать о счастье во всём мире по Фрейду.
Классика. Обязательно к прочтению.