I rescued this book from a dumpster, which seems like an oddly appropriate way to pick up a copy of Brave New World. I’m not quite sure why it was in the dumpster, because there was nothing wrong with it, but maybe someone just really couldn’t handle Aldous Huxley? Anyway, it was nice to finally acquire my own copy, rather than reading various shredded versions from the library.

I know that this book is pretty much a classic in the dystopian genre, so I’m assuming that most of you have read it and have your own thoughts on it. Each time I read it, my response to it changes, which is one of the reasons I like re-reading really good books. I get more out of this book each time.

For example, I’ve always noticed the racism inherent in this book, and I kind of attributed it to the era in which Huxley lived. But I realized that it’s really more of a statement on nociety, not Huxley’s prejudice, persay. It makes total sense that if you are writing about an idealized homogenized society from the point of view of the white elite, that of course you would set up a color-based stratification, codifying racial class differences. The feelie movie with the “gigantic negro” bears a lot of similarity to the “shocking” films of the 1930s, which featured innocent blonde white women and big bad black men, making the book in a sense a mockery of Huxley’s society. I don’t know why it took me so long to see that.

As often happens when I read a dystopian novel, I feel like we are creeping closer and closer to the world of the novel. We’ve got soma and feelies and everything else to keep the populace sated and calm, for example. I can easily see how people would eat this society and choke on it, because even if we aren’t quite as regimented as the World State, we seem to be well on the way.

Demographics:

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Published 1932, 259 pages. Fiction.