Friday, January 1, 1982

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World published 50 years ago this year

First posted 6/24/2020; updated 7/6/2020.

Brae New World

Aldous Huxley

First Publication: 1932


Category: dystopian novel


Sales: ?

Accolades (click on badges to see full lists):

About the Book:

The Chicago Tribune called Aldous Huxley “the greatest 20th century writer in English.” AZ The New Yorker called him “a genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine.” AZ He “was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization.” AZ

Brave New World, his masterpiece…retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature.” AZ The Wall Street Journal called it “one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century.” AZ

“Ignorance is far from bliss in Huxley’s terrible vision of a future of rampant consumerism, worthless free love, routine drug use and cultural passivity.” TG Set in a future version of London and “written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s,” AZ Brave New World “follows the fortunes of the illegitimate son of a senior governor, who has grown up in America, outside the new empire, and who experiences a dramatic culture-clash when he has to live under its rules.” WK

The story “speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.” AZ “It propounds that economic chaos and unemployment will cause a radical reaction in the form of an international scientific empire that manufactures its citizens in the laboratory on a eugenic basis, without the need for human intercourse.” WK This is all done “at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls.” AZ


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