Genre: English Novel - Science Fiction
Published: 1932 - Read: 2022 May
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
Pages: 288
Reader: CMBC
Brave New World has become a classic sci-fi dystopian novel. It began life as a parody of H G Wells’s utopian novels. Brave New World is a savage attack of the false (but popular) notion of the ideal state, the modern enthusiasm for interferring with nature, and the idea of the noble savage (an idea associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau - but he is not solely responsible!).
The protagonist, at least for the first part of the book, is 'Bernard Marx'. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that the name did not ring any bells with me at all! I thought it odd that name of the main character, in a novel vying with Nineteen Eighty-Four as perhaps the greatest dystopican English novel, should have failed so spectaularly to have established itself in the common consciousness. (Sorry about that long, convoluted sentence.)
The title is taken from Shakespeare. The Tempest, to be precise. Act V scene 1.
Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!
Brave New World cannot escape comparison to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is set in a far distant future - 2540 CE [AD for the unregenerated] - which must give us pause when making that same comparison.
Only just started this one, so not much to say at the moment...
Awards
Banned (at some time or other) in the USA, Ireland and India - so can't be all bad.
Fun fact: Aldous Huxley was nominated for a Nobel Prize for Literature 9 times between 1938 and 1964, but was never awarded it. Aldous Huxley's half-brother, Andrew Huxley, was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for figuring out how an electrical impulse travel through a nerve cell. [Wikipedia]