Brave New World is a famous satirical science-fiction novel by the English author Aldous Huxley. The novel, published in 1932, reflects Huxley’s concern over the impact of technological progress, modern production, and consumption on society. He believed that scientific and political developments were already beginning to produce the kind of dehumanized world he created in his novel. Brave New World is an example of a dystopia, a type of fiction that portrays a presumably ideal world as a nightmare. Huxley took the title, which he meant ironically, from a line in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
Brave New World is set in the future. It is the year 632 AF (After Ford). The industrialist Henry Ford is a hero in the world of the novel, but an emblem of mindless mass culture to Huxley. The novel describes a citizenry produced from bottled embryos into a caste system of beings controlled by subconscious messaging and a drug called soma. The state prohibits personal emotions or individuality and bans art and the idea of beauty as disruptive. Infants are conditioned to accept a passive, collective existence in which the words mother and father are prohibited.
The central character in Brave New World is “John the Savage,” who was found in an isolated area of New Mexico. He has educated himself and believes in moral choice and the spirit. John travels to London, but there he is treated as a freak who refuses to accept the dominant social order. Eventually, he becomes helpless and confused by his yearnings and frustrations, goes insane, and takes his own life.
