Huxley's "Brave New World".

Essay by Gayass December 2003

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Huxley wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931. It appeared three years after the publication of his best seller, the novel Point Counter Point. During those three years, he had produced six books of stories, essays, poems, and plays, but nothing major. His biographer, Sybille Bedford, says,

"It was time to produce some full-length fiction--he still felt like holding back from another straight novel--juggling in fiction form with the scientific possibilities of the future might be a new line" (Aldous Huxley)

On having a look at the time line one can see that Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, before Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany and before Joseph Stalin started the purges that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union. He therefore had no immediate real-life reason to make tyranny and terror major elements of his story. Because Brave New World describes a dystopia, it is often compared with George Orwell's 1984, which also describes a possible horrible world of the future.

The world of 1984 is one of tyranny, terror, and perpetual warfare. Orwell wrote it in 1948, shortly after the Allies had defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and just as the West was discovering the full dimensions of the evils of Soviet totalitarianism. In 1958 Huxley himself said, "The future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell"(Brave New World). Brave New World itself seems to be a communist world as there is equality among all and it's the ruling class that decides what each person does. He also worried about the dangers that threatened sanity. In 1958, he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas we will find...