Volume 3 – “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

Set five hundred years into the future, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World presents a series of contrasts: a world unlike our own that is also similar, a utopia that is a dystopia, a regimented yet licentious society, a funny yet serious story. The story of individual rebelling against group conformity or the story of asceticism versus hedonism; a satire on 1920s consumerism or a warning about engineering humanity? The meaning of Huxley’s work has proved ambiguous.

In Brave New World, dystopia is a superficial consumer heaven of standardised humans governed in the name of stability. Emerging out of destructive worldwide conflict, Huxley’s World State has discovered that consumerism, leisure, recreational drugs constitute the most effective means of authoritarian rule – all of which are underpinned by the application of mass production to human reproduction.

Taking a satirical look at social convention, religious ceremony, utilitarianism and hedonism, Huxley shows the blurred lines between utopia and dystopia. Would we want utopian happiness, if it were forced upon us? Would we want this enjoyment, if denied our freedom? Would we want this stability, if never given the chance to be ourselves?

Volume 3 unpicks Brave New World in all its ambiguities, discovering a utopia that is also a dystopia and a work that is satire, prophecy and warning all at once.

The Series

• Volume 1 – Introduction: Why Dystopia?
• Volume 2 – “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Volume 3 – “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
• Volume 4 – “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell
• Volume 5 – “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess
• Volume 6 – “High Rise” by J.G. Ballard
• Volume 7 – “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
• Volume 8 – “Green and Pleasant Land” by Steve Shahbazian