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Brave New World is a 1932 dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley. The book anticipates developments in reproductive technology, eugenics and mind control that combine to change society beyond recognition. It is widely recognized as Huxley's most famous and enduring novel.
The term brave new world is also used in print media when refering to a plan of action that may have undesired or negative outcomes. For example:
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
Set in the future, it describes a dystopian society of Huxley's imagination. In this society people are "decanted" into a chemically-enforced and totally conformist caste society. Children are engineered in fertility clinics and artificially gestated. The three lower castes are manufactured in groups of up to 96 clones, and they are chemically stunted and/or deprived of oxygen during their maturation process to control their intelligence level and physical development.
The Alpha caste consists of those destined for leadership positions, with Betas filling professional and administrative posts requiring high education, but without the leadership responsibilities of the Alphas. These two groups together form the upper castes, with Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons comprising the lower castes, each with a descending degree of intelligence (Epsilons being so stupid as to be illiterate, and trained to perform the most menial tasks without complaint). People are thus manufactured to fill their jobs, rather than jobs being created for people. Within these classes are sub-groups, plus or minus, which further determines their roles in society (every possible combination appears at least once in the text, with the exception of Delta-Plus). Members of each caste also wear uniforms, the color of which identified which caste they belonged to. Alphas wear grey, Betas mulberry, Gammas green, Deltas khaki, and Epsilons black.
From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated, by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep, to believe that their own is the best class to be in. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an anti-depressant and somewhat hallucinogenic drug called soma.
Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in 1932, twenty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental, not a genetic, hell".
Citizens have no awareness of history except for a vague idea of how terrible things were before the inception of the present society. They know that humans used to be viviparous and what parents and birth were, but these concepts are taboo, and "mother" and "father" are this society's equivalent of dirty words.
The protagonist, named John, is the son of two citizens of the Brave New World (he is the result of an accidental contraception failure). His parents were visiting a "savage reservation" when his mother got lost; she was stranded inside the reservation and gave birth to him there. He grew up with the lifestyle of the Zuni Native American tribe and a religion that is a blend of Zuni and Christian beliefs. The culture shock which results when the "savage" is brought into regimented society provides the vehicle by which Huxley points out that society's flaws.
The key moral point of the book revolves around the problem that the people in the society appear, and state that they are, generally happy. John Savage, however, considers this happiness to be artificial and "soulless". In a pivotal scene he argues with another character, world controller Mustapha Mond, that pain and anguish are as necessary a part of life as is joy, and that without the former to provide context and perspective, "joy" becomes meaningless.
In other themes, the book attacks assembly line production as demeaning; feminism and the liberalization of sexual mores as being an affront to love and family; the use of slogans or thought terminating cliches; the concept of a centralised government and the emergence of Socialist and Communist attitudes, as well as the use of science to control people's thoughts and actions. It is also interesting to note the names of two of the main characters—Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx (alluding to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and founder of communism Karl Marx).
The title of the book is a quotation from Miranda in Act V of Shakespeare's The Tempest, when she is joyfully reunited with her family. John Savage is a keen Shakespeare fan, which sets him further apart from the vast majority of humanity in Huxley's dystopia. Like most of the world's artistic and cultural achievements, Shakespeare's works are banned and unknown in this society to everyone but the World Controllers.
In 1993, an attempt was made to remove this novel from a California school's required reading list because it "centered around negative activity."
These are fictional and factual characters who died before the events in this book, but are of note in the novel.
As a method of underscoring similarities to his fictional dystopia and his own contemporary culture, Huxley incorporates several sly, satirical references to targets such as the Church of England, the BBC or British tabloid The Daily Mirror ("The Delta Mirror"), Henry Ford, George Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud.
Brave New World and George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are both often used in political discussions of government actions perceived to be anti-libertarian. However, a key difference between 1984 and Brave New World is that while in 1984 people are kept from knowledge perceived to be "dangerous" by means of continual mass surveillance and coercion, in Brave New World the characters are physically engineered to not desire "dangerous" knowledge in the first place. One could say that while in 1984 the people are dehumanized by the state controlling their natural instincts such as sex or free thought, in Brave New World the "state" infantilizes the masses by giving free rein to basic human instincts such as sex and ceding responsibility to herd mentality.
Both novels incorporate a class of people (in 1984 the "proles" (proletariat) and in Brave New World those who live on "reservations") who exist on the periphery of the dystopian society in a state of relative physical squalor, but with little to no societal interference, outside of an enforced state of non-education. While both classes as such are peripheral to their respective milieux, they serve as an important device for delineating contrast between the dystopian society in question and what the author perceives as being a more ideal society.
In addition, the society presented in Brave New World is, to some extent, tolerant of outsiders, in so much as it respects the idea of there being an "outside". While the dystopian world of 1984 is all-encompassing, the world Brave New World includes "savage reservations" and "the islands". The latter are effectively places of exile for freethinkers, but they are also to some extent a "safe haven". No such places exist in 1984.
Brave New World--Revisited (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965) is a companion book (also by Huxley) which gives considerable additional detail about the society of Brave New World. In many ways it is different in tone and impact to the original novel, due to Huxley's evolving thought and his conversion to Buddhism between the two books.
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