"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.

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BRAVE NEW WORLD

Author

The English novelist and essayist Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in July 26, 1894 and died Nov. 22, 1963. He was a member of a very scientific and literary family. He intended to study medicine but was prevented from doing so by an eye ailment that almost blinded him at the age of 16. He then decided to turn to literature and published two volumes of poetry while he was still a student at Oxford. He became famous by his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which was a humorous satire on the intellectual conceit of his time.

Huxley's early comic novels demonstrate his ability to exaggerate intellectual debate in fiction. In addition, he also discussed philosophical and social topics in a lot of his essays. Huxley began to be more and more critical of Western civilization in the 1930s. Brave New World (1932), his most celebrated work, is a bitterly satiric novel of an inhumane society controlled by progress and technology, in which art and religion have been abolished and human beings reproduce by artificial fertilization.

Huxley's distress at what he regarded as the spiritual bankruptcy of the modern world led him toward mysticism and the use of hallucinatory drugs.

Summary

The novel takes place in A.F. 632, approximately seven centuries after the twentieth century. A.F. stands for "after Ford", in reference to the great industrialist Henry Ford who was the pioneer of the assembly line technique of mass production. The world is dominated by World Controllers who are responsible for the stability of the society. To ensure social stability, the World Controllers have created a system which categorizes the society in five casts, the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. The lower the cast, the lower their intelligence is, which makes the work they have...