Brave New World

10 Pages 2421 Words

describes Brave New World as “a nightmarish vision of the future in which science and technology are used to suppress human freedom” (8). Some of these nightmarish predictions may seem fantastic and extreme, but as Mr. Huxley asks, “by A.F. 600, who knows what may not be happening” (xx). Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is about freedom in the future, and his prophetic warnings about the loss of freedom due to increasing population, dwindling natural resources and advancing technology remain relevant and contemporary in today’s world.
The essay Brave New World Revisited was written by Aldous Huxley in 1958- twenty- seven years after the publication of Brave New World. In this essay he discusses the forces that he believed would lead the world to the organized society that he prophesied in his novel. In Brave New World Revisited he describes himself as less optimistic than he was when writing Brave New World in 1931. In 1958 he felt that the prophecies he made twenty-seven years earlier were coming true faster than he expected. Instead of six centuries into the future, he predicted that the completely organized society of the novel, the loss of free will, and the love of servitude were “....coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren” (Huxley 1).
Some reviewers of Aldous Huxley’s works praise the satire and originality of Brave New World but question Mr. Huxley’s abilities to predict the fate of civilization which he did in Brave New World Revisited (Green vi). In the utopian world of the novel, world population has been maintained at about two billion. The birth rates and death rates have been controlled because new people are “decanted” in a laboratory instead of being born and are then conditioned to die at the age of sixty. When a person dies they are cremated and the phosphorus from their bodies is recovered-more than a kilo and a half per adult corpse-and is us...