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Brave New World elegantly and stirringly places itself as one of the most important novels written in the 20^th century, a true gem of the dystopian canon, and one of the most prophetic. There are some glaring and fundamental reasons for why this novel must be read, and taken into the context of how the majority of society in the present is carrying itself foolishly into the future, despite the symbolic warnings this book posits to those who read it. Huxley satirizes a post World War society relishing in the power of technology, and wrote a novel that has stayed relevant and eerily familiar in its dystopian milieu; a novel that didactically works to transpose humanity’s overenthusiastic embrace of industrial ‘progress.’

Imbued with poetic representation, Huxley works the novel’s characters, plot structure, and interconnected Shakespearian, Pavlovian and Marxist themes to allow for interpretations of political discourse, technological ethics and the advancement of the human condition, in almost every era of human progress since it was written in 1932.  What Huxley sought to do, like any other dystopian writer, was to project the discomforts of his present into the future. The 1930’s saw the rise of the ideology of consumption, the Soviet Five-Year Plan, the synthetic creation of vitamins, the spectacle of a chicken heart that lives on without the body, and the control of diabetes that had massive implications for the progress of medicine and technology.

Mr. Huxley utilized these anthropomorphic progressions to underlay the way in which economic security and absolutism could work to allow for the placid servitude of the human race. The true genius of Huxley’s novel is the way in which objects, names, items or novelties have a function for his symbolism and relation to his present. Names like Bernard Marx, literary references to Othello and Romeo and Juliet, the displacement of the talkie by the ‘feelie,’ and the careful placement of poetry and ‘hypnopaedic’ repetitions to drive home his message. Each parallel to the progressions and relations to reality are profound, and connect in a way that mirrors a true master of dystopian satire.

Huxley intricately laced the New World society controlled by the ‘World State,’ with a mutation of religious regard for technology and the assembly line of the Ford Model T; the mass production of the automobile. All dates are preceded by ‘a.f.,’ or ‘After Ford.’ Places of worship are referred to as ‘Church of Our Ford,’ and in a bastardization of the Christian cross, the top is removed to form a ‘T.’ It is the assembly line metaphor that forms the basis for the World State’s ability to condition individuals from birth; genetically, physically, and psychologically for their ‘inescapable social destinies’ inside of a stabilized caste system, separating each ‘echelon’ of human segregation by size, intelligence and appearance. It is also for this reason that Brave New World finds itself prominently cited on reading lists the world over, almost 80 years later.

Huxley uses Brave New World to deal with ‘the problem of happiness,’ anticipating that as technology progresses, it is not what suppresses the human individual; it is what pleasures and distracts it. In Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell sought to depict a world that was controlled by surveillance, repression, the eradication of information and language, as well as intimidation, through fear in Big Brother. What Huxley develops through Brave New World is the concept that it is not what suppresses us, takes away from us, or instills fear in us. It is what makes us numb with convenience, pleasure, comfort and complacency, so that it is not the banning of books, the eradication of history or the constant threat of oppression, it is the individual itself; conditioned from birth, to come to be controlled by promiscuous sex, drugs and the technological wonderment that causes its own servitude, and lack of awareness.

It is this very core idea that places Brave New World in a realm of literature that makes it fundamentally essential to read. Because Huxley, in 1932, had such foresight to see within the way that human beings could harness technology for their own use and ultimate enslavement, the relevance of his vision jumps out into the present and points out some alarming similarities, perhaps now more than ever. What reason do I have for literature if I have a glowing rectangular box to fill my imagination with delight (and commercials)? For what reason do I require information when my life is constantly bombarded by so much of it that I become passive and complacent? How do I know what truth is when it is drowned in a sea of irrelevance? Why experience life in the flesh, in the present and in the beauty of reality, when I can get it for cheap and easy through ‘feelies,’ ‘obstacle golf,’ and the ‘centrifugal bumble puppy?’ I can take a holiday on Soma, the perfect drug that Huxley foresaw as well. Zoloft, Percocet and Prozac? His vision is eerily accurate.

Huxley used his genius to present his readers with an all out ambiguity of prose and symbolism. The future is ultimately unknown to all of us, but it can be pieced together by making judgment and extrapolations of the present into that unknown. As human beings it is interesting to note that only our own actions as a species can allow us to anticipate, learn from, yet still take steps in the directions we can see will take us to ruin and darkness. Huxley could imagine such enhanced states of our future and it is through him that the production of such masterpieces of speculation, such as Brave New World, can come to fruition and turn the dreams we have for our future, into nightmares.