Sample introductions: Brave New World

A. Brave New World is a novel set in a futuristic society with a lifestyle very different from our own. In this society people are not born from human parents but are incubated artificially in hatcheries. Everyone is conditioned to a particular lifestyle. The Alphas are the administrators and scientists. They are the highest class. The Epsilons are the lowest class. They can be produced in sets of 96 identical twins. They do the factory work. The government controls everything. This happened after a terrible war when governments around the world decided that technology must be used to maintain peace. The main technologies are biology and psychology. The main characters, Bernard Marx and John Savage, do not fit into this society.

B. Brave New World, a magnificent novel by Aldous Huxley, was written about sixty years ago and yet it predicts so much that is true today. With his great mind, Huxley looked ahead in time, and as we read the book we can see how much our society has become like the one he so wonderfully imagined before all the modern advancements in technology which we have today. This book might be called “science fiction” but it is fiction which has become true in many ways. What is it that Huxley could not imagine? We have artificial music and mind-controlling drugs and television and computer games. In our modern world, we are much less “up tight” about sex. It is truly amazing how Huxley was able to imagine all of this. It just goes too show how creative some people’s minds can be. If all of us could think ahead like this, we could avoid many of our world problems and have a better society.

C. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a genuinely disturbing novel about basic human nature. In presenting his view of the options which mankind faces in the future, Huxley imagines what might be called a Utopia, an imaginary society in which all of the basic social problems have been solved through biological and psychological manipulations. With biological and mind control technologies nearly perfected, wars are a thing of the past; the conflicts between social classes have been eliminated by making all classes happy with their conditions; economic problems have been solved; fear of death and aging are forgotten anxieties of the bad old days; and the old burdens of sexual guilt have disappeared with the basic article of faith that “everyone belongs to everyone else.” But for all these solutions to age-old problems of mankind, Huxley’s Utopia is not so perfect, for what the “controllers” of the society have done has been to reduce human beings to a state of emotional and intellectual infancy. The freedom to be fully human has been eliminated.