I tried to read this as a kid, couldn't get into it. This time around it was a quick and easy read.
I really liked Huxley's intro to a later edition:
"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time....
Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. ...To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, ...is surely vain and futile."
Ah...thanks Aldous, now I have an articulate reason why the Police's 1986 remake of "Don't Stand So Close to Me" is lame. Yes, "lame," it goes nowhere. So there you go, Mr. Lucas, a moral argument that Han shot first!
Oh yeah, a book review....I'll give it a A- , but maybe I'm only doing that because it's a classic.
Is it necessary to say "SPOILER ALERT" for a 75 year old book??
In our utopia of the future, everyone is happy with their lot in life. They're bred and trained to do and appreciate their occupation. There's plenty of excitement in the off hours. Plenty of sex. Drugs to make you feel good with no side affects or addictions. Everything is built to ensure the happiness of the populace.
It appears that most of the people are happy. But what is happiness? (I think this might be a theme of dystopian literature.) The founding fathers said we "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Huxley seems to think that when we choose Life and Happiness, the cost is Liberty. In Brave New World, everyone is so occupied with simple pleasures (meaningless sex, titillating entertainment, happy-pills) and they have been bred and trained to accept their society, to give major importance to the stability of society to accomplish the happiness of all, that they don't think or care about liberty. In fact they believe that they have the freedom to do what they want to make them happy, lots of sports, entertainment, sex, drug options. What more could one want?
So, the sex life in this dystopia? I'll call it hippy-style free-love. People hook up, and go along to the next hook up, no sense in being tied down to one person for more than a couple of weeks. In fact society frowns on the characters that don't sex around. (Quite different than 1984. We'll see how other dystopias deal with sex.) The only obscenity... procreation or reference to parents... because infants come from the factory.
How did the dystopia occur? People wanted to be happy. People gave up their freedom in order to be safe. "What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?" pg 228
my favorite line, which I hope to use in daily life: "you've got to stick to one set of postulates. You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of the Centrifugal Bumble-puppy." That right!
interesting quotes:
"Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, or course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered." pg 228
"What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?" pg 228
"People believe in God because they are conditioned to believe in God." pg 235
"One of the principle functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like,...to inflict upon our enemies." pg 179