Commentary on Brave New World

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1 COMMENTARY: BRAVE NEW WORLD. ALDOUS HUXLEY. NEW YORK: HARPER AND ROW, 1932. 311PP. I am sure Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” raised some eyebrows back in the thirties when it was first published. It is a science fiction novel set 600 years in the future. It is about a world that no longer consists of families, babies are engineered in test tubes, taking a drug known as Soma to put your mind on holiday is an everyday relaxation method, sexually promiscuous behavior is not only expected, but taught to them as children and being always happy, clean and healthy is normal. I have never read anything else written by Aldous Huxley, I in fact have never read much science fiction at all in which to compare this story to. I have seen lots of science fiction movies so I decided to watch a couple of different movies based on this book. Neither one seemed very well made, so I decided that the book definitely stands alone in my obvious limited world of science fiction knowledge. In my opinion the story starts off a little confusing, but after reading through chapter three, I went back and reread from the beginning and it made a little more sense to me. Getting epsilons, gamma, gamma-plus, delta-minor, etc. clear was not something I accomplished while reading the story, but I did find the class system interesting. We seem to have that in the here and now, but just not named or trained to be that way, they are just there and accepted. The book opens to a building where the babies are engineered and then raised. A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories, over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and in a shield, the world’s motto, Community, Identity, Stability.¹ This paragraph gave me a hint of what was to come in the plot and the state of mind of most of the people of this time period. The story is filled with a lot
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