Aldous Huxley
1932
I read this when I was in middle school.
I don't think there is anything in my life I have ever NOT gotten as much as I didn't get this novel.
I wasn't too young for the subject matter when I was however-old-I-was when I read it. I just didn't have enough critical thinking skills, or the two semesters of college Shakespeare necessary to really appreciate what Huxley had to say here.
Of all of the things this book has to offer, the most shocking thing is that it was written in 19thirty-fucking-two. I couldn't really wrap my mind around that at first. 1932? Really? Holy shit.
In 1932, in the US, only 11% of farm houses had electricity. Can you believe that shit? In one part of the planet, we've got a guy writing about soma and rocketplanes, and in the other, we've got a pre-WWII population without electricity.
Wowza.
If you've not read or heard of Brave New World, well, my guess is that English isn't your first language or you're not much of a reader. It's one of the cornerstones of the dystopian genre. Even if dystopia isn't your thing, and even if sci-fi isn't your think, you should read it-- it was written in 1932, and it's about the future. Awesome stuff.
If you're a curious person, you'll learn lots about contemporary world history of the 30s and slightly previously. Huxley name-drops all over Brave New World. Too bad most people now don't know who many of the referred-to are.
Awesome novel, from both a SF/dystopian standpoint and as a social critique (while those two usually go hand-in-hand, that's not always the case).
While I was reading it, I found myself, from time to time, thinking that the world Huxley described wouldn't be all that bad. It's the notion of hypnopaedic conditioning that really makes it not all that uncomfortable for me.
If you went through your entire life confident with the knowledge that yours was the best life there was, would you really have that much to complain about? Probably not, because you had been conditioned since before you were conscious not to think about it.
If you could take a pill that carried with it no risk of social, moral, ethical of physical repercussions, a pill that made you forget about your worries and enjoy your mind, wouldn't you? A pill with no unpleasant side-effects, even.
If you could live your life knowing that anything you needed was within your capabilities to have, and that you would always be perfectly content knowing that there would be no war, no strife, and no social instability, wouldn't that be appealing?
This sounds like it would be a terrible and very un-free world to live in, right? But if you had been conditioned since birth to think that it was the best possible way to live, and that there was no option, you would know nothing of freedom and think only about how awesome it was to be alive.
Doesn't sound like too bad of a deal.
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