As the book club wrapped up the month of February with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, we turn our attention to the distant future. This month we will be preparing to discuss Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. The year is 2540 (AF 632), and society has been systematized, organized, medicated and sanitized. People are no longer born, they are created in labs and engineered to be satisfied with their class and career which has been prescribed to them. No more mothers and fathers, and no more husbands and wives, “Everyone Belongs to Everyone”. A perfectly balanced society, surly no problems here.
We aren’t entirely new to sci-fi, last year we dipped our toe into one of the earliest examples of science fiction with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, where the anxiety of scientism was personified in the character of Viktor Frankenstein where his disastrous hubris birthed a monstrous creation into the world. In Brave New World, the monster has enveloped the entire globe. As Huxley presents a world that is ruled entirely by a scientific authoritarian regime. Is it dystopian or utopian? Sometimes its hard to tell.
As we read the novel keep in mind the pedigree of Mr. Huxley. His grand father was the famous biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, known as Darwin’s Bulldog for his avocation of the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin. Aldous’ brother, Julian Huxley was the president of the British Eugenics Society(1959-1962). And having been published in 1932, expect to see a lot of optimistic scientific progressivism in this story as the world had yet to witness the traumas of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb.
Also, Aldous Huxley was the teacher and mentor of another author who published a very famous dystopian novel, George Orwell. His novel 1984 (published in 1949) is often compared with Huxley’s Brave New World. As it depicts a world enveloped by a violent dystopian authoritarian regime. A comparison of the two novels would provide a rich conversation. Both novels have influenced the genre of science fiction films, comics and novels deeply.
I’m looking forward to what these Spring months have to bring.
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