Seeking to refute the argument of Huxley's Mustafa Mond - that moronic underclasses were a necessary 'social gyroscope' and that a society composed solely of intelligent, assertive 'Alphas' would inevitably disintegrate in internecine struggle - Wells depicted a stable egalitarian society emerging after several generations of a reforming elite having complete control of education throughout the world. įor his part Wells published, two years after Brave New World, his own Utopian Shape of Things to Come. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a 'negative utopia', somewhat influenced by Wells's own The Sleeper Awakes (dealing with subjects like corporate tyranny and behavioural conditioning) and the works of D. Wells', but then he 'got caught up in the excitement of own ideas.' Unlike the most popular optimistic utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Arthur Goldsmith, an American acquaintance, that he had 'been having a little fun pulling the leg of H. Wells's hopeful vision of the future's possibilities gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novels, which became Brave New World. Wells, including A Modern Utopia (1905), and as a parody of Men Like Gods (1923). Huxley said that Brave New World was inspired by the utopian novels of H. The family system will disappear society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.' In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. Scogan, one of the earlier book's characters, describes an 'impersonal generation' of the future that will 'take the place of Nature's hideous system. Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first dystopian work.Ī passage in Crome Yellow contains a brief pre-figuring of Brave New World, showing that Huxley had such a future in mind already in 1921. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, and had published a collection of his poetry ( The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four successful satirical novels: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928). By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist. Huxley wrote Brave New World whilst living in Sanary-sur-Mer, France, in the four months from May to August 1931. The first Standard Chinese translation, done by novelist Lily Hsueh and Aaron Jen-wang Hsueh in 1974, is entitled '美麗新世界' ( Pinyin: Měilì Xīn Shìjiè, literally 'Beautiful New World'). Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des mondes ( The Best of All Worlds), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and satirised in Candide, Ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759). Indeed, the next speaker replies to Miranda's innocent observation with the statement 'They are new to thee.' Shakespeare's use of the phrase is intended ironically, as the speaker is failing to recognise the evil nature of the island's visitors because of her innocence. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. The title Brave New World derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I: It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 banned and challenged books of the decade since the association began the list in 1990.

Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in 'the top 100 greatest novels of all time', and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. This novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932.

A wonderful new world