Future or book?

Morgan Spencer

More stories from Morgan Spencer

Future or book?

In AP English we just read Brave New World and it is for sure a weird, but interesting one. It was written by Aldous Huxley in 1932. The genre of this novel is science fiction and utopian and dystopian fiction. The time period which the book takes place is rounded about to 2532, 600 years into the future.

The interesting part of the novel is the way the two societies work. The societies are totally different, but yet someone just does not seem to fit into either society. This could become a problem for not only the outcast, but also for others surrounding him.

Brave New World could represent what the future has in store and some ideas in the novel compare to what we are seeing our society now.

The novel opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future (“After Ford”). Human life has been almost entirely industrialized and is being controlled by a few people at the top of a World State. The first chapter, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned according to the society’s strict caste system, establishes the theme of dehumanized life. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in their world.

In this society they are told to use soma and other ideals for pleasure, and an Alpha Plus named, Bernard Marx meets a beautiful young lady named Lenina. He then asks her to go on a vacation with him to New Mexico to the remote Savage Reservation in New Mexico, a place far from the controlled, technological world of London. Before Bernard leaves, his superior, the D.H.C., spontaneously reveals that long ago he, too, visited the Savage Reservation, and he confesses in sorrow that he lost the woman who accompanied him there. Embarrassed by the disclosure of his socially unacceptable emotion, the D.H.C. turns on Bernard, threatening him with banishment for his own social sins. He says he will send him Iceland. While at the savage reservation Bernard and Lenina see plenty of unusual rituals, and back in their society they do not worship God, they worship Henry Ford. So the religious ritual they see is odd to them. They meet a boy named John Savage and his mother Linda. They take them back to the Brave New World Society and eventually unfortunate events take place. The ending is a tragedy, but again a relief for John.

Even though the novel is far into the future and us as readers may not understand half of the ideals described in the book it is still worth the read.