Brave New World

Brave New World is a dystopian science fiction novel by the English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1932 and set in a futuristic World State where human beings are mass-produced in hatcheries, genetically engineered into a rigid caste system from Alpha to Epsilon, and conditioned from birth through sleep-teaching and the pleasure drug soma to accept their assigned roles without question. The story follows Bernard Marx, a discontented Alpha who arranges a visit to a reservation outside the World State's borders, where he and his companion Lenina Crowne encounter John, called the Savage, who was raised there on the language and values of Shakespeare rather than the World State's conditioning; brought back to London, John's confrontation with the World State's engineered happiness leads him to find its frictionless pleasure-seeking society intolerable. Rather than the totalitarian terror of contemporaries like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley imagined a dystopia maintained through comfort, consumerism, promiscuity and manufactured contentment, a control-through-pleasure model widely read as prophetic of consumer society and biotechnology. Brave New World is considered one of the foundational texts of dystopian fiction and is regularly read alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four as one of the twentieth century's two defining visions of a controlled future.