Community, Identity, Stability: A Review of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Last month I reviewed one of my favorite SF novels of all time, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This month, I turn to one of Orwell’s near-contemporaries, an author of another Dystopia that paints a world just as controlled as Orwell’s, only with a little more velvet on the iron fist: Aldous Huxley, and his magnum opus, Brave New World. Published in 1932, it predates Orwell’s work by just shy of two decades. While Orwell was influenced by his experiences in World War II, Huxley, nine years his senior, was more influenced by the laissez faire attitudes of the 1920s when writing his particular brand of future society. Although Brave New World‘s London is, on the surface, a much more desirable locale than the London of Winston Smith, we cannot forget that there is still that iron fist beneath the velvet surface. Click through after the break to get my take on this amazing novel.