Note: I wrote this I guess at the beginning of 2019 lol, and haven’t edited it.
A brave new world.
Aldous Huxley
1932
A brave new world is a dystopian fiction by English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley. Dystopian fiction is a category in fiction which depicts a bleak future. A future where things go wrong and the world is worse off. In this book he imagines a world where civilization has taken a giant leap, where science has finally managed to remove all pain from human life including old age and a world where everyone is “happy”. But the book revolves around Huxley’s argument, if one would like to live in such a world at all?
In Huxley’s world, the most of the world is civilized, however some parts of the world have refrained from being civilized. In these parts, people are still living the “uncivilized” life, there is disease and old age. The uncivilized world represents our present world to a large extent. People in the civilized world refer those of the uncivilized world as ‘savages’ and find them amusing. These savages, as they are called, live in regions known as ‘reservations’ which are like zoos. Here I personally felt a sharp pang of inhumanity the author wanted to depict in these “civilized” people. Treating fellow human beings as objects of amusement like animals, it seemed in perusing progress, people lost an important thing, humanity.
Another interesting aspect of the civilized world is the way they cure unhappiness. In Huxley’s world, people take ‘soma’ a miracle drug that cures unhappiness and makes you instantly feel good. People take these a lot as there is almost no place for sadness in the civilized world. People don’t ever deal with their life problems; if anything goes wrong, they take soma, feel good and forget. In a way this reminds me of our own world, I believe we have become too timid for the realities of life. There is always so many distractions on the internet, we can always loose ourselves in this vast ocean of cat videos and forget our responsibilities. But going through the pages, I thought, does happiness make sense if there is no sadness? When it comes so cheap with a pill. Hence, I think in the book, people, while perusing everlasting happiness, lost what actual happiness is.
Moreover, it took me by surprise when I learnt that people in civilized world ‘hate’ having deep relations. There ‘everyone belongs to everyone’, as they put it. To love someone is a taboo. To care for someone is a sign of madness in this world. Hence, probably the deepest of relationships, the relationship between a mother and a child is absolutely unacceptable. Hence, crazy enough, babies are not born the normal way in the civilized world. Here, babies are born in test tubes artificially fertilized. Hence, there is no family. On a level I think since there is pain in every meaningful relationship, say the pain of a loved one passing away, by rejecting the very concept the author freed the civilized world of this pain. Everyone is on their own, “happy” as they put it taking soma pills. This again reminds me of our present world where individualism is on the rise. Doing things on one’s own and being self-sufficient have become matters of great pride and achievements. But are we going to be happy doing that? Are we going to be fulfilled in a world where one has everything one needs but no one to share it with? I believe it’s a question Huxley wants us to ask ourselves.
It amazes me how, so much of Huxely predicted matches with our present situation and possibly our future. When we consider the fact that it was written almost 90 years ago is all the more reason to respect this brilliant mind!
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Throughout the book, Huxley makes us question ourselves, portraying such a vivid world using his amazing imaginative prowess. It is interesting how detailed the world building is and how the author manages to point out deep philosophical questions all while telling such a captivating story! However, I do think the writing could have been better, however that might be my inability to understand the language style used as the book was written long ago in the 30s! Also, the story at times gets fuzzy and feels stagnant. All in all, the book is pretty good and would recommend it to anyone who is looking to read some science fiction as well as something philosophical.
= )
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