Brave New World - Aldous Huxley, 1932.

Brave New World, written roughly fifteen years before Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, was the first major dystopian novel. Set in a London five hundred years in the future, Huxley warns of a totalitarian life where unhappiness is rare, yet creativity unheard of. Humans are indoctrinated during their sleep from a test tube birth into either Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon models, which then decides whether their position in life will be the most menial factory work, or the most high ranking politicians. It is unthinkable to have only one sexual partner, and a feeling of contentment is perpetuated with the constant consumption of soma, a hallucinogenic drug, of which Huxley’s interest and usage is well known.

The novel specifically focuses on Bernard Marx, an unlikeable and two-faced Alpha social outcast, who everyone presumes had something amiss during his conditioning process as an infant. In trying to impress potential partner Lenina (casual sex is endorsed by the World State) he takes her to a savage reservation in New Mexico, a place where ‘uncivilised’ people are kept; whose appearances and behaviour seem similar to that of Native Americans, or other tribal groups. It is here that John, a ‘Savage’ is found, a child reared, unusually, by his mother, and who has developed an appreciation of the arts that is nonexistent in the ‘civilized’ world.

Although the passages detailing people, architecture and the simply unimaginable way of life of the year AF 632 (632 years after the first Model-T Ford rolled off the production line) are fascinating, it is only after Huxley introduces the character of the Savage that his satire really begins to bite. Orwell feared that in 1984 books would be banned, however Huxley depicts an even worse situation; a world where books do not even register on the average human’s conscience as they are unneeded, at least in 1984 there existed the ability to learn and rebel. The penultimate chapter is an enlightening debate between the Savage and Mustapha Mond, a world controller, regarding the advantages of a godless and artless society, which is just as engaging now as it was when written in 1932.

In Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, Huxley concluded that he considered the world was moving faster towards his dystopian premonition than he had thought in the 1930s. Whether this is still the case is open to debate, but although times have changed in the past seventy years, Brave New World remains to serve as a reminder of the very real challenges our forefathers saw facing the world in the years directly preceding the Second World War.