The conditioning of young children and babies to be certain parts of society sounds frightening, but I contend that it isn’t different from what we have now. They are all essentially slaves, or “major instruments of social stability” (7). Society creates a few types of people, conditioning them from the time they are embryos to either work in particularly hot weather (the tropics), to be amused by death in order to handle working around it, to be less-than-average intelligence in order to perform menial tasks, or to be very casual about sex.
Here’s the premise: it is the future and all babies are born in laboratories. The prose is simple, even bad at times, and the plot is horrifying and comedic at the same time. It isn’t heartwarming or particularly beautiful. I don’t think it’s a book one is supposed to like. I can’t decide if I liked Brave New World. And then I realized that it is book #58 on the BBC book list, so I killed two birds with one stone: pleasing people and checking a book off of my list. One of my students this summer suggested that I read Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley.
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