Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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51 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Current even today, essential, provoking, reading., 8 Jun 1999
By A Customer
Aldous Huxleys', 'Brave New World,' is a grim look into a future where science controls all. Human beings are, 'conditioned,' to create a stable society where free thought is corrupted from birth. Huxleys' political wit and vivid characterisation sustain the novel at a pace that doesn't dazzle but allows the reader time to contemplate the many issues the text cannot fail to provoke. If you take on, 'Brave New World,' you have to be prepared to spend hours reconsidering your own views on science, religion, freedom and the multitude of other issues that the novel provokes, just remember to stir the soup while your lost in thought. Huxley never hands you the answers on a plate; the novel is entirely two-sided, perhaps written with a slight sense of ambivalence by Huxley toward his subject. Huxley has created a novel which decades after it's first edition is still essential reading and current, it tackles issues of genetic modification, cloning and totalitarianism, while managing to avoid the pitfall of being too scientific or political. If, like me, you enjoyed, Orwells' 1984 you must, must read this, it's far better. Afterwards read, ' The Island,' which gives a contrasting account of Huxleys' vision of a true Utopia, and 'The Doors of Perception.' The only reason I can't call the novel inspirational is because that's what everybody says about it. I shall call it genius.
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Frightening Dystopia, 4 Sep 2003
Five hundred or so years into the future, and the our very existence as human beings has been taken control by the World Controllers. The primary goal of this dystopian situation is to create a global happiness, a mutual harmony between all humans. But all humans are no longer equal, depending on birth process defined by the controller, Alphas are at the top, intellectually superior in everyway, followed by Betas, all the way down to Episilons who are produced in large bundles, human mass production. That covers the main situation, although their are many other factors and conditions in this new world. The first part of the book follows Bernard Marx, a slightly irregular Alpha plus human. This is where the conflict against conformity arises, as he starts to behave more like an individual. The second part of the book introduces John Savage, the son of a woman from the Dystopian society, but brought up amongst indians in the savage reservation. John acts as an individual caught between two cultures, conditioned by his mother, but aware of freedom through the local indians in the puebla. Brave New World is one of Huxley's great masterpieces, much ahead of his time in thought and literary creativity. It raises some serious questions about the way the world was heading at the time, published a few years before the Second World War, a time of scientific breakthrough and experimentation, beginning of mass consumption. The work is comparable to Yevgeny Zamyatin's famous novel, We, also about a dystopian society, but written just over ten years before Brave New World, obviously another novel with a similar theme is Orwell's classic 1984, which all make very enjoyable reads.
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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Playing God, 18 Sep 2000
By A Customer
Brave New World tells the story of a future time when society and everyone's fate is engineered by advanced technology and brain washing. The aim of this brave new world is to ensure that everyone is happy, and as a matter of fact, this aim is almost perfectly achieved. It portrays a world where humans have mastered the necessarily technology to play God, and this technology is used to achieve happiness at the expense of freedom, individuality, and several other basic human rights. This price is so high that for most readers these people have lost most of their humanity, the characteristics that make us human. I think that Brave New World is a must read. It expresses the believe, or the possibility, that technology and progress may in future damage the human race beyond repair. I also find it amazing that this book was written in the early thirties, before the space age, before computers, before genetic engineering, before nuclear weapons, well when we were much more distant than we are now at being able to play God. Unfortunately, the plot and the characters could have been a little bit more interesting, or perhaps no one can be interesting in this brave new world.
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