Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. NY: Perennial Classics, 1998 (originally published in 1932 by Doubleday, Doran & Co.). 268pp. $10.00. 32-3525. ISBN 0-06-092987-1 C.I.P.
First published in 1932, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World still generates interest and controversy. In the recent furor over human cloning, Brave New World was frequently invoked as a horrible example of what human cloning could lead to. No doubt the cloning debate also stimulated a second made-for-TV version of Brave New World, the latest starring Leonard Nimoy. I stumbled upon the book as a teenager, more years ago than I care to remember. By then, I was already an inveterate science fiction reader, although my interests were focused on tales of space travel and interstellar civilizations. Most science fiction tales of the time projected contemporary social and political problems into a technology-enriched future. It took Huxley to show me the power of the biological and behavioral sciences in shaping a future society quite different from any that I had ever imagined. There was also a great deal I didn't understand on my first reading of Brave New World, and I was motivated to learn more about biology and psychology. For example, I discovered that Huxley was satirizing the work of the radical behaviorist, John Broadus Watson, in the marvelous scene describing aversive conditioning of books and flowers in babies destined to become workers. Brave New World was only one of many books and experiences that influenced my intellectual development, but from the perspective of time, I think it acted as a catalyst in shifting my interest from the physical to the biobehavioral sciences.—Edward S. Matalka, Worcester State College, Worcester, MA
The imaginative trappings of a futuristic, completely managed society established Huxley's Brave New World as a classic in the utopian literature. As science fiction those trappings seem conservative now, at least with respect to the science-based innovations with which that dark passion play was bedecked. Set in AF 632, the Year of Our Ford (A.D. 2540), Huxley imagined a World State where stability is the primal need of the five social classes (Alphas to Epsilons in descending order of status and privilege). All classes, of course, are programmed via neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia (sleep teaching) to fulfill happily their precise social and economic functions. The trappings of AF 632 are almost quaint in comparison to the current Year of Our Ford, AF 90 (a.k.a. A.D. 1998), at least with respect to Huxley's radically envisioned future in A.D. 1932, when Brave New World exploded into Western consciousness. Television? Helicopters? Synthetic music? Anthrax warfare? A 6 1/2 hour rocket flight from Charing Cross to Santa Fe? (The Concorde does Paris to New York in only 3 3/4 hours.) Bokanovsky's Process to produce 96 identical twins? Hello Dolly (AF 89, a.k.a. 1997). Sex hormone chewing gum to perk up the gents' appetite? Try Viagra (AF 90...and you don't even have to chew!). If all else fails to bring about the mandated state of perpetual bliss, there was always soma, the ultimate pacifier, calibrated to put the disaffected into the marshmallow zone of feel-good for precisely timed periods. No hangover! (We have a way to go in AF 90: Alcohol is no contender, while Prozac is a marginal first draught, as it were.) This is to suggest that we have already achieved the majority of Huxley's startling predictions in just 14 percent of the time projected. For all his clever extrapolation of (primarily) biological and behavioral science, the Brave New World story line is thin. A disgruntled marginal Alpha orchestrates the return of a savage to London from a reservation in New Mexico. Various stereotypes with pun-intended names (e.g., Helmholtz Watson) walk stiff-legged across the narrative as the primitive returned (like Oedipus who also loved his mother...an obscenity in Brave New World) lunges toward self-immolation. The final scene in this bleak soulscape plays off the famous Einstein boyhood fascination with a magnetic compass. The twist, however, is the exact inverse of Einstein's epiphany.—Samuel A. Mudd, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA
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