![]() One of the most elementary relationships in life is the father/child relationship. ![]() This is really classic early 19th Century eugenics plus in vitro fertilization on steroids. Each class of people is given a different designation and assigned a different role in life. They are given different stimulating or retarding treatments so that they will fit with their castes – Alphas, Betas, etc. Grown and ‘decanted’ at the appropriate time. Many of them are identical – several hundred at a time. Sex and procreation have been completely divorced. Sex was at times procreative but only in certain situations. Parents were chosen to pass on their traits. Huxley brings it to a point Hastings probably couldn’t have imagined. I thought Hastings carried Eugenics to its conclusion in City. What was supposed to be a perfect society is instead devoid of almost anything that would give it meaning. And its a little harder for some of those who grow up on the inside – such as Bernard and Helmholtz. Conditioned, most can grow up in it and in the State you can “live and move and have your being.” Its much harder for a savage from outside. In an effort to shut suffering in, they had to banish all the good stuff as well. They’ve given away conviction, courage and truth. But as the reader will see, they’ve given away risk. They are aiming at a perfect society, free of any misery, distress or unhappiness. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.īrave New World is every bit as dystopian as City of the Endless Night. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. Mostly for the sake of ease.īut that’s the price we have to pay for stability. But his future civilized people use the term so he does also so I will too. To reduce them to savages, as if they are somehow of less value than the civilized people is something I find detestable. Inherently valuable, created in God’s own image. Unable to atone for his past sins while living in civilization, he hangs himself.Ī quick note: I’m going to refer to the savages some in this article (as I already have) and the very term gives me the willies. Her death upsets John and catalyzes his rebellion from society which leaves him living alone in a lighthouse on England’s coast. His mother soon succumbs to endless soma holidays. Due to his mother’s repeated sins of promiscuous sex with the natives, his light color and Shakespeare-inspired life, he was an outcast among the Zuni.īernard brings John and his mother home. He learned to read and was inspired by an old book of Shakespeare’s works. She longed for “civilization” and told John about it. She had gotten pregnant due to a rare fault of her birth control and so she gave birth to John in the savage village. John’s mother had also been a tourist there about 20 years earlier. The “savages” are a Native American people – the Zuni – who practice a syncretized form of Christianity and live essentially as their ancestors. He takes his “love interest” (though there is really no love, its all just recreational sex completely divorced from procreation or dedicated relationships) to the land of the savages – a cordoned off section in what is now the southwestern United States. He doesn’t quite belong and all he wants is to fit in. They have recreation and soma, a drug that makes you euphoric and drowsy without a hangover.īernard Marx is a member of this society but he is somewhat of an outcast due to his wondering mind and comparatively short stature. They are “decanted” in biological castes, the lower of which do the more menial jobs and the higher ones do the more difficult jobs (though jobs they are trained to do easily, mindlessly) and everyone is happy. People are no long born, but grown in a lab. ![]() After the Nine Years War, humanity united and eradicated all obstacles to stable civilization. But one of the points of this blog is that science fiction IS social commentary, among other things, at heart.īrave New World is set a few hundred years in the future and in a completely different society than what we know. Its certainly dystopian science fiction though it is generally considered more of a social commentary. ![]() Aldous Huxley – on of those Huxleys – published Brave New Worldin 1932.
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