Art, literature & culture

Publication of Brave New World

1932

Brave New World is a dystopian novel by the English writer Aldous Huxley, set in a future World State where people are bred in laboratories and conditioned from birth to fit into fixed social castes. Citizens are kept content by easy pleasure, consumer goods and a drug called soma, while art, family and deep emotion are discouraged. The story follows Bernard Marx and the outsider John, brought from a reservation, whose clash with the system exposes its emptiness. Huxley wrote it partly as a satire of the optimism of the early 20th century about technology and mass production. Along with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, it became one of the century's best-known warnings about totalitarian control.

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