Brave New World

Rating:
Summary: timeless in social commentary
Review: Although this book was written over seventy years ago in the midst of mass production, the message is timeless. With the industrial revolution to look back on and the onset of the idea of mass production at the time this book was written, technology becomes the antagonist. Huxley paints a picture of a future where capitalism makes humankind into just another commodity. People in this society are manufactured and graded within the hierarchy like chickens in a hatchery. This book will bring forth ideas of what we as individuals want from a society and what aspects of it are important. The message is timeless because it applies to how we live today. This book touches other aspects like sexual attitudes, social importance based on birth as opposed to merit, tolerance towards violence, the use of drugs for recreational purposes (which proved to be prescient considering when it was written) and the important of high art to provoke thought. This book is pretty small and yet is full of ideas. The book is terse and the characters in the story are flat to establish the conflicts and move the plot along. If you've read it in high school as I have you'll still enjoy it many years later.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome. . .but kinda creepy
Review: I read this book for English class last year and was blown away. This book is amazing! It cleary shows what destruction human beings are capable of, and what the world might evolve into. If you read closely and think about the world today, you will notice that we have some things in common with Huxley's vison of the future world. I think this is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Brave New World
Review: Brave New World

Our future may be closer then we think. This book offers a glance into the future that shines some light on our present. Aldous Huxley book, Brave New World, has earned its four star rating, because it gives a good description of what our future could possibly be like. The main goal of Huxley "system" is to keep people happy and to motivate them to consume as much information as possible. The main character is a naturally born and bred person who comes into this world and urns to be a scientist. Huxley does a good job of detailing the factory state and reasons for its development. Many may think we should strive for a perfect race; however, until we realize that we will never be perfect race, we will never achieve perfection. I believe Huxley was trying to say that a superior race may be the way of the future; there would not be any deformities and every one would be equal unlike us; but never the less our individuality makes life worth wile. This book may help others understand how things to come may be, it may keep people open minded about our future.
The first part of the book is mainly about a young man named Bernard. He was made as one of the more intelligent humans. Everyone in this society is manufactured to do a certain job, and people are taught to serve the production. They are programmed from the beginning to work toward certain mottos and sayings, community, Identity, and stability. Ernard is treated sometimes as a outcast because something went wrong during his conception, and he turned out small and weak. He is often alone and criticized. Bernard has his own ideas and visions of life. He wants to know what it might be like to have a wife and a child. Bernard knows a pretty girl named Lenina, but she does not possess Bernard's new age ideas and visions. Bernard and Lenina decided to go to New Mexico to visit a savage reservation. When they got there, Lenina complains about all the horror and the smell. She forgets her soma at the hotel and has to suffer without it. Soma is a drug invented for people when they go on holidays and outings.

The story line concentrates on the savage's experiences in this brave new world. Only to find that it does not live up to his expectations and dreams. In the beginning Bernard Marx (the person who brought him to the civilized world) and his quest for happiness and a love-live, also finds problems with society, but still craves what it has to offer him. For a while the savage is the key but it does not last.
The book has been written decades ago and the fascinating thing is that the described civilization actually comes pretty close to today's industrialized nations.
I do not like science fiction books that use monsters or extremely unrealistic technological inventions. Aldous Huxley tried to predict the future in a very realistic way, based on certain trends that started developing during his time. He did a great job and it is not too unlikely that the future that's still to come will actually be very, very close to the future he writes about.
I have read the book three times now and I keep finding interesting details that I had not noticed before.
This is much more than science fiction. It often has more connection with psychology. It's not just a vision of the future but an accurate a look of the mindset in today's world. It is no imaginary vision, just the world of Huxley. I remember when my friend told me to reed this book. When I first opened it I did not understanding much of it, but somehow it always said that this was a book I should read. Well now I am done and my feeling wasn't Wright.

This is a great book, but not easy to read. If you like your fiction nice, fluffy and happy, then this won't be your cup of tea at all. If you like books that not only have a strong plot but are also thought provoking, you not only should read this but you need to.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome -- Please try it!
Review: BRAVE NEW WORLD is a great book, but not a particularly easy read. If you like your fiction nice and fluffy and happy, then this won't be your cup of tea at all. If you like books that not only have a strong plot but are also thought-provoking, you not only should read this but you NEED to. Another great novel I just read -- [e-mail] by Tom Grimes

Rating:
Summary: An elegant discussion about freedom and society
Review: This book is not intended to be a vision of the future, though that is it's fictional setting. Instead it is a story about freedom, or lack of it, about society and our role in it and about conflict between different belief systems. In that regard Huxley does a remarkable job - he uses an interesting story and landscape to provide insight into the human condition in the 20th century and beyond.

It is set in a fictional world where people measure time since Ford (as in the motor company's founder) - 360 AF. Ford has become a deity, the founder of modern society through his ideas about manufacturing. Of course the society presented has little or no bearing on Ford's ideas but then hypocrisy looms high in this world. The society is highly structured, it has a caste system dividing people into groups from the Alphas (the thinkers, more individual, highly revered) to the Epsilons (conditioned for no more than menial labor having deliberately stunted development).

The conditioning of society is key. Babies are bred, not born. Conditioning starts in the testtube and continues through sleep hypnosis and role play through life. Huxley takes the idea of conditioning too far, in my opinion - I think our genes provide too powerful counterweights to this conditioning but it's easy to accept the idea. Society is controlled by a readily available mood enhancing drug called Soma, by the uniformity of it's people (a process has been developed to cause the development of many many identical children from a single fertilized egg), by mindless pornographic entertainment and freely available sex and by the conditioning allowed.

It's here that we find the most interesting parallels - are we using mood enhancing drugs too much? Is entertainment just a pap to the masses? We certainly feel a sense of discomfort from the extreme forms presented in the "Feelies" but are we really that distant?

Set against this are characters who rebel, who feel they are repressed, who feel the need to be alone, who want to pair with a single other person instead of being promiscuous, who feel individual ford-dammit! In the extreme this is represented by "The Savage" - a boy born of a mother who came from the world Huxley portrays but is accidentally left in a reservation where the backwards old-world (e.g. our world) ideas persist. The savage does not fit in in either world - rejected by the other members of the tribe for being the wrong color and for the promiscuity of his mother, found to be too weird in the conditioned "modern" world where his ideas are too weird.

It can easily be argued that Huxley has created too extreme characters - particularly in the savage who is into self-mutilation and extreme sacrafice. However, it is by the use of these characters that some of the subtleties come out and so long as we see them as simple foils I don't think we need to get too caught up in them.

It's too easy to view this book as some kind of vision of the future and laugh. In one very early episode they are showing new employees around the bottling plant (the bottling of fetuses of course!). There is all this technology to manufacturer babies according to precise specifications and then the proud guide indicates the massive *card* index needed to record it all! However, as I started, this isn't a vision of the future, it's a fictional world which acts as a bedrock for the presentation of ideas and it's the ideas which are the beauty of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Better Than 1984? Well...Maybe
Review: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is undoubtedly a great book. There are always comparisons between it and Orwell's classic 1984, namely because they are both so-called "dystopias."

I would say that Brave New World is not as enjoyable as 1984, but it is probably better. I say this because it seems more likely to me that our society will become like Huxley's "World State" than Orwell's "Oceania." The reason is that the "World State" is a (distorted) view of progress in which birth is determined by an elaborate eugenics system and people get all their happiness from state-sactioned ... and ...., whereas "Oceania" is a nightmarish halt of progress. I'm not sure that made much sense, but if you read both (and you should), you may understand what I mean.

And despite what I said about the book not being as enjoyable as 1984, I still managed to read the thing in a couple of days.

Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read!
Review: The story plays in the future, in a civilization that mainly consists of human beings that were artificially produced and 'made' to fit in to a certain category of intelligence level. The main goal of the system is to keep people happy and motivate them to consume as much as possible. The main character is a naturally born and bred person who comes into this world. I don't want to tell you more, my intention is to just give you an idea what the book is about. The book has been written decades ago and the fascinating thing is that the described civilization actually comes pretty close to today's industrialized nations. I do not like science fiction books that use monsters or extremely unrealistic technological inventions. Aldous Huxley tried to predict the future in a very realistic way, based on certain trends that started developing during his time. He did a great job and it is not too unlikely that the future that's still to come will actually be very, very close to the future he writes about. I have read the book three times now and I keep finding interesting details that I had not noticed before. Also recommended: [e-mail] by Tom Grimes, The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

Rating:
Summary: flawed, but important story
Review: The book was written for people of Mr. Huxley's time (mostly Christians of the Western world), but intended as a contribution to lasting literature. The book's concept is its strength, simplistic characterizations and inconsistent plot lines are its weaknesses. Huxley does a good job of detailing the factory state and reasons for its development. The characters are sketches that do not behave according to the internal logic Huxley ascribed to them. Most striking is "the Savage's" ability to speak and interact with Londoners in the Brave New World immediately upon release from his accidental upbringing in an uncivilized reservation, though he rejects their values. Significantly weakening the story were "the Savage's" arguments that it is natural for humans to believe in God and that that belief gives life meaning. The problem with this argument is subtle, but reveals Huxley's religious chauvenism when faced with social history that Huxley was well aware of: many long-lasting societies had beliefs in many gods, rather than just one, that often the gods were personification of forces who were not the source of meaning so much as arbiters of human fate. In the 70 years since its writing, the factory state Huxley saw developing has evolved in complex ways, while societies make stronger and conflicting religious and moral assertions.

Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking
Review: I often rate a book/movie/etc by what new ideas it offers to me as a reader, and this book gets the highest rating based on that criterion alone. Huxley's ideas on how a utopian state would function is thoroughly absorbing. Take, for example, how Huxley describes the "conditioning" of the kids so that they behave in a certain way. The scene in the beginning of the book in which the babies are conditioned to hate books and flowers is chilling and amazing. The nature of relationships in this world are also interesting, as people are encouraged to have as many partners as possible and are forbidden to actually "love" a person. That is definitely a teenage boy's wet dream. Huxley could have really dug deep and explored the nature of relationships in this world, but he doesn't do so. He is more interested in the institutions that keep the people in a permanent state of happiness, than in the people themselves. This could be a reason why, while ideas and processes are well-described in this book, character development often suffers.

Comparisons with 1984 cannot be avoided. Brave New World is better at describing the workings of the state and how the different "departments" of the state function to control the people in the state. 1984, on the other hand, tells its tale more from the point of view of the people being controlled, which is why it gives the reader a better emotional connection with its well-developed characters and relationships. In conclusion, I would say both books are must-reads as they will offer different things to you as a reader.

Rating:
Summary: Never read
Review: this book is horrible... never read it. first its dull and a little gross but i hate how Huxley actually thought it was similar to the present. the message in the book is people can't change. Its probably one of my least favorite books. dont waste your money.