I… really hated Brave New World. I was reading through a bunch of classics, and read Brave New World right after “1984”, and it was so much worse. Where 1984 felt like it’s characters took believable action, and generally felt like a genuine attempt to forecast the future (though still with very substantial political motivations) I couldn’t get over the feeling that “Brave New World” had almost no sanity checks done on it and is primarily a piece of politically motivated persuasion. It’s economy makes no sense, the behavior of its characters makes no sense, the science makes no sense, and all of it feels completely pervaded by some kind of moral advocacy from Huxley that feels like it’s trying to make some moral points, but repeatedly failing and instead shooting itself in the foot.
Like, it feels like Huxley was worried about some trends in society that I feel broadly good about (like substantially less guilt-driven motivation, less prudish norms around sex, a weakening of the nuclear family unit), and then tried to somehow project them to an absolute ridiculous extreme that makes no causal sense, just to make them look bad, as a tool for political advocacy in the present period he wrote it in. Kind of similar to the “Oh god, what if everyone turns gay, won’t humanity go extinct?” rhetoric you sometimes see in media from the 80s and 90s (and of course a bit today).
I forced myself to read through it, and really wouldn’t recommend that anyone else read it. Read modern sci-fi, read Heinlein, read 1984, read anything but Brave New World. It was genuinely the worst book I have read in the last 5 years. I can’t think of a single idea in the book that felt like it wasn’t covered worlds better in some other sci-fi book. It feels that when Huxley discovers some interesting idea in his visions of the future, he can’t help but ridicule it and attack it with a kind of pervasive misanthropy that fails to actually engage with any of the potential causes of the trends he is forecasting, or engage genuinely with the motivations of the forces and people driving those trends.
Wow, that was more vehement than I was expecting. I remember reading 1984 and Brave New World near one another, and thinking that Brave New World was significantly better. I guess I wasn’t as put off by the pro-traditionalist vibes in BNW as you were, and I remember thinking that the government in 1984 was way too capital-E Evil to be very interesting. I’d argue that BNW is about the way things can still go wrong even when you get a lot right (ending sickness and poverty), while 1984 just seemed like Stalin’s USSR with better surveillance tech.
Yeah, I am not fully sure what made it such a miserable experience for me, and it’s totally plausible there is more intellectual merit in there that I didn’t successfully pick up on, but I sure really despised my time with it. Epistemic state of the above should probably be modeled as “I had a terrible time, your experience might differ”.
I… really hated Brave New World. I was reading through a bunch of classics, and read Brave New World right after “1984”, and it was so much worse. Where 1984 felt like it’s characters took believable action, and generally felt like a genuine attempt to forecast the future (though still with very substantial political motivations) I couldn’t get over the feeling that “Brave New World” had almost no sanity checks done on it and is primarily a piece of politically motivated persuasion. It’s economy makes no sense, the behavior of its characters makes no sense, the science makes no sense, and all of it feels completely pervaded by some kind of moral advocacy from Huxley that feels like it’s trying to make some moral points, but repeatedly failing and instead shooting itself in the foot.
Like, it feels like Huxley was worried about some trends in society that I feel broadly good about (like substantially less guilt-driven motivation, less prudish norms around sex, a weakening of the nuclear family unit), and then tried to somehow project them to an absolute ridiculous extreme that makes no causal sense, just to make them look bad, as a tool for political advocacy in the present period he wrote it in. Kind of similar to the “Oh god, what if everyone turns gay, won’t humanity go extinct?” rhetoric you sometimes see in media from the 80s and 90s (and of course a bit today).
I forced myself to read through it, and really wouldn’t recommend that anyone else read it. Read modern sci-fi, read Heinlein, read 1984, read anything but Brave New World. It was genuinely the worst book I have read in the last 5 years. I can’t think of a single idea in the book that felt like it wasn’t covered worlds better in some other sci-fi book. It feels that when Huxley discovers some interesting idea in his visions of the future, he can’t help but ridicule it and attack it with a kind of pervasive misanthropy that fails to actually engage with any of the potential causes of the trends he is forecasting, or engage genuinely with the motivations of the forces and people driving those trends.
Wow, that was more vehement than I was expecting. I remember reading 1984 and Brave New World near one another, and thinking that Brave New World was significantly better. I guess I wasn’t as put off by the pro-traditionalist vibes in BNW as you were, and I remember thinking that the government in 1984 was way too capital-E Evil to be very interesting. I’d argue that BNW is about the way things can still go wrong even when you get a lot right (ending sickness and poverty), while 1984 just seemed like Stalin’s USSR with better surveillance tech.
Yeah, I am not fully sure what made it such a miserable experience for me, and it’s totally plausible there is more intellectual merit in there that I didn’t successfully pick up on, but I sure really despised my time with it. Epistemic state of the above should probably be modeled as “I had a terrible time, your experience might differ”.