BOOK REVIEW: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5:19 PM
Original title: Brave New World
Author: Aldous Huxley
Number of pages: 255
Available in: Practically every language.
I read it in: Spanish
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
It's the year 623 After Ford and we find ourselves in a utopic society to perfection: human beings are mass made in vitro, they are conditioned since their birth and they develop easily in a happy and modern world. But in some places there are still Savage Reservations, where savages live freely and, as expected, when these two worlds collide, something will go wrong.
In Brave
New World, Huxley presents us with a not so positive utopia, a world in which
the sense of indivuality and free emotions have been lost and substituted by a
constant consumption of 'soma', a drug that gets rid of all feeling of sadness
and discontent, while the hipnopedic teachings of conditioning keep every
person, from each different caste, in complete obedience, that way continuing
with a perpetual state of happiness and modernity.
This novel, as
many others of its time, was written in representation of a socio-political environment
of its age. During the year 1930, when it was written, England was going
through an economic crisis, and this added to the visit that Huxley did to the
United States in which he was profoundly impacted by the state of sexual
liberation and consumerism of the society, inspired quite a lot the satirical
language in which the book is written.
Aldous narrates us a very interesting
story that, with the adequate context, could lead us to reconsider the freedom
we have nowadays to express ourselves and feel. However, Brave New World didn’t
cause in me a big lasting feeling of indignation: in this future world, God doesn’t
exists, only a wide cult to Ford, and people are sexually free, repeating
constantly ‘everybody belongs to everybody’, which didn’t appear to me as a
scandal as it probably did at the time, when people sympathized with the savage
and the multiple characters in the book that think slightly different than the
rest and that can become a problem for such an advanced and complete society.
Nonetheless, the grim perspective that
Huxley paints us is that everything will keep on being exactly as it was before
these minor happenings, mainly because it has been so long since all this
started that there’s nobody to point our fingers at and blame for the lack of ‘tradition’
in this new world, as every single human that exists to this point of the story
was made in vitro, using the Bokanovsky method even, and all of them do every
single day as they have been conditioned to do depending on their caste, and were
raised with everyone else in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, having this way no
one to blame or no one to learn from. Maybe this terrible need of finding the
villain in the book is my big flaw, but the best way I can describe this novel
is as an obscure satirical utopia from which each person will draw something
different from, depending if they know the context it was written in or,
mainly, depending on their context.
As a final point,
it is well know that Aldous wrote this novel drawing inspiration from utopical
novels of one of the biggest of science fiction, H. G. Wells, so maybe that
will be my next choice because, as of now, utopias are apparently not my thing.
- You can buy it at: Barnes and Noble, Amazon or The Book Depository.
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