26 CLASSICS: Brave New World Review #3

Title: Brave New World
Author: Aldous Huxley
Genre: Classics

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs, all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his
distress...

Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece. 

Me: Another dystopian classic that had absolutely blasted my mind into a thousand pieces. How do these authors create these worlds?

 First of all, let me get something straight. Those cheesy books with pointless technologies and weird revolutions are not true dystopian novels. THIS is a dystopian novel. THIS messes with your brain and makes you fear humanity. Personally, I adored Brave New World. I thought it was great in every single aspect possible. It is definitely one of most interesting classics I have ever read, so it went by at a rather fast and smooth pace. There are so many things I liked, so I'll have to structure this review...

1) The writing is amazing. Huxley writes with a tone and vocabulary that fits the message of the novel so well. In fact, one of my absolute favorite parts of the book was where (about the second chapter) the writing built up to eventually depicting four different scenes at a time. There are four different scenes happening at the same moment, all full of passion, and the writing first starts with one and then builds up to extracting snippets of each conversation and forcing the reader to go insane trying to piece it together. It did take me a while to read that part, but afterwards I felt so drained and tired...until I realized that THAT WAS THE POINT. Then I started screaming at the genius of that piece of writing. 

2) The world is eerily familiar. This book was written in the 1930s. It is fantastic how Huxley develops the world of the World State (btw, I just studied Human Geography, so this is absolutely great for that). The most important person is Henry Ford, who first proposed the idea of overcoming state boundaries and economic globalization. Time is seen as Before and After Ford, and instead of believing in God, they implement Ford into their daily lives (Oh, good Ford!, Fordian Science Monitor, etc.) Babies are not born to mothers but rather cultivated in bottles and then injected with chemicals to sort them into levels of intelligence before they are born. 

3) The message is mind-boggling. At one point the director of this World State is talking to "the Savage" and "the Savage" points out the flaws in the society, mentioning the absence of religion and the overuse of soma (a drug). The director replies that even though it may seem strange as an outsider, the people within the society are happy. In fact, people are genetically controlled to be happy, because they cannot feel complexities of emotion (at the Epsilon human level). He says happiness cannot coexist with diversity and change...which if you think about it, is true. 

It absolutely blew my mind. 

Rating: Beat My Scale x 1000

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that lengthy review and if you found yourself completely confused...READ THE BOOK! It will amaze you. 

Thank you so much guys!