Title: Brave New World
Author: Aldous Huxley
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 288

Summary
Just copying this bit from amazon here:

Aldous Huxley’s tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a “utopian” future—where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.

Notes

This book was recommended to me by Wassy who read it in High School and enjoyed it. So, looking to take on some of the books regarded more as classics that I had missed, I grabbed it.

Simply amazing. I read though the entire thing in about 2 days and was riveted the entire time.

First of all, for a book written in the 1930′s it’s world view of eventual technology is surprisingly spot on. Except for the ever present flying cars anyway. But even more terrifying, his vision of the future remains to be entirely plausible. Huxley takes the undercurrents of human progress and development from the early 20th century and has created the vision of a utopian society on the surface. Everybody is happy and can get everything they desire to have (and are conditioned to not desire anything that they can’t).

People are created in gigantic labs with various, predetermined levels of ability which force them into certain castes of society. But they are happy regardless of their position because they are conditioned to be so. Which brings up the question, is this really happiness?

You can see a lot of what Huxley describes actually undercutting events of today as well which makes this book as terrifying to read as it is. Particularly the push towards consumerism. In the book people are conditioned to believe that, for example, if their clothes rip, it’s better to throw them away and buy new ones than fix them. All of their games and entertainment options are specifically created to require them to buy equipment and consume more and more stuff.

You can see that push going on today, brought to light particularly due to the economic recession where the US Government has gotten involved in trying to convince people that the only way out of our economic downturn was to buy more stuff and encouraged such by giving out stimulus checks. We’re being trained to be good little consumers and we don’t even really realize it.

I could keep writing about this book, but I think I’ll stop here. I’ll conclude by saying that even almost 80 years after it was written, Brave New World is no less relevant today than it was then. The book is simultaneously riveting and terrifying and if you somehow managed to miss reading it like I did, I highly, highly recommend checking it out. Lot of food for thought contained within.

Next Book
I’m back on the Wheel of Time bandwagon with The Fires of Heaven. I’m also considering picking up and reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. It’s been getting good buzz from people whom I trust their opinions on books, so I’ve been thinking of checking it out. I’ve got the sample on my Kindle so I’ll see how I like that.