BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Author: Aldous Huxley

Published: 1932

Type of work: Fiction

Age: The Modern Age.

         Helmholtz Watson, Mustapha Mond, Lenina Crowne, Bernald Marx, type of literature: fiction, science fiction, dystopia, children’s literature, speculative fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction.

Brave new World’s title derives from Miranda’s speech in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, act V, Scene;-

O Wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new word.

That has such people in’t.

-William Shakespeare The Tempest, act v, Scene 1, 11,203- 206.

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Word, Published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty and true relationship. The novel also comments on humanity’s muddled belief in progress and science. Huxley had himself desired a scientific career before the near blindness that he suffered during childhood kept him from such pursuits. The western world, Huxley believed, place to much emphasis on scientific progress at the expense of a love for beauty and art. His novel attempts to show how such science, when taken too far can limit the flourishing of human thought. In world war 1 humanity had seen the great destruction that technology such as bombs lanes and machine guns could cause. Huxley believed that the possibility for such destruction did not only belong to weapons of war but to other scientific advancements as well.

   Brave New World takes credit with orwell’s 1984 for advancing a new genre of literature that fuses science fictiob, political allegory, and literary ambition. H.G. Wells, a famous writer of science fiction and dystopian literature, panned the book as “alarmist”

      Huxley’s civilizes world is a society of ultimate knowledge. Humans have conquered almost all areas of scientific inquiry; they control life, death, aging, pleasure, and pain. This mastery of knowledge has given human beings great control over their world, and this control in turn has given great powers to those who first envisioned such a society, and who continue to maintain its existence. However, such knowledge and the abuse of power that it inspires often lead to downfall.