Blissed Out in Fantasy Land

An Honest Review of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

TL;DR - 5/10

Dystopias are seemingly everywhere these days. Whether it’s books, movies, TV, graphic novels, video games… whatever your storytelling medium of choice, the world is falling apart. Generally, these dystopias take the form of oppressive, all-powerful governments running roughshod over their inhabitants, making their lives a living hell for unknown diabolical purposes. But what if government control took a different form? What if, instead of a boot stomping on the face of humanity forever (to paraphrase George Orwell), it was a friendly face handing out happy pills and whispering slogans while you sleep? This is the civilization of Brave New World, the brainchild of Aldous Huxley and a classic of the dystopian genre.

A quick summary for those who haven’t read it: Brave New World drops us into the London of the future, a world where everything is synthetic, including the people. Humans are mass-produced, grown in bottles and made in batches of identical babies. It’s a Capitalist’s wet dream, where consumption is the highest good and Henry Ford is literally god. It’s an explicitly stratified caste society, where each batch of humans is designed and conditioned to their role in society. The Alphas are the smartest and most physically capable, the…