Brave New World

Brave New World is a 20th-century literary classic, a dark metaphor for a possible future.

The worst predictions of capitalism have come true: the gods of consumption and comfort triumph, and the globe is divided into ten seemingly safe and stable zones. Humans no longer procreate, sex has become merely a diversion, and the letters of the Greek alphabet have been perverted to classify human beings by caste. Everyone accepts their place in the new, perfectly ordered social hierarchy. Essential human values have no place in this world, and inhabitants are created in vitro using a technique conceived in the image and likeness of an assembly line. Soma, the drug par excellence in this dystopian world proposed by Huxley, helps inhabitants escape the routine. In exchange for this neat order, freedom of expression and critical thought have been eradicated. Bernard Marx, the novel's nonconformist and intelligent protagonist, must test the limits of the society that created him, embarking on a journey beyond the dystopian borders of his universe.

Critics have said:
"Depending on how you look at it, Brave New World portrays a perfect utopia or its horrific opposite, a dystopia: its beautiful inhabitants live safe and free from disease and worry, but they do so in a way that, we want to believe, would be unacceptable to us."
Margaret Atwood

"Aldous Huxley was an extraordinarily prophetic man; there is no other novelist in the 20th century who has written a more sagacious guide to the future."
J.G. Ballard

"Brave New World has also retained its satirical mordancy and an expression of great aphoristic impact, with a vivid sense of the power of language and ideas in a changing human society."
Robert McCrum, The Guardian