Brave New World: 04/08/07

There is no way in this short amount of space I can do Brave New World justice. It was written in the 1920s as a rebuttal to an unpleasant trip to the United States. Huxley was put off by the excesses of the "Roaring Twenties": jazz, chewing gum, youth culture, skyscrapers and Henry Ford.

He tosses all these annoyances together to create a world where Ford is the new god (shudder), classes of workers are mass produced, families don't exist (except among the savages on reservations) and people are conditioned for how they should think and feel for every condition.

As with the other books of its era, it is more social commentary than actual story. The first third is not much more than world building, the setting up of the grand "what-if". The second third looks at a few of the privileged lot to see if they are as happy as they've been programmed to be. It also shows the other side of the coin, life among the "savages". It ends when the savage world collides with the civilized world. As this is a dystopian look at the future, the "savage" loses.

The book covers themes that will surface again in Philip K. Dick's novels: consumerism, advertising, sex, and drugs.

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