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It is the year of Our Ford 632 (or the 26th century in our own Gregorian calendar) and, in the world state run on the industrial principles first established by Henry Ford, the evils of war, poverty and unhappiness have apparently been abolished. Biological engineering creates a hierarchy of different citizens - Alphas, Betas, Gammas and so on - who are tailor-made for the tasks that society will demand of them. Psychotropic drugs and consequence-free sexual promiscuity provide the pleasures that keep all levels happy. Lenina Crowne, a conventional Beta Plus lab worker, and Bernard Marx, an Alpha Plus psychologist inexplicably dissatisfied with the apparently ideal life he leads, travel to the Malpais Savage reservation in New Mexico where an ancient mode of living still survives. There they meet John, son of an accidental refugee from the world state who ended up on the reservation. John returns with them to London where he confronts what he describes as the 'Brave New World' of apparent utopia (John is a reader of Shakespeare, unknown in the world state, and the phrase comes from The Tempest). Rapidly disillusioned with the world he discovers and convinced that the 'perfect' society is, in truth, a soulless hell, John retreats into isolation but he cannot escape either the notoriety his arrival has provoked nor his attraction to Lenina. Disaster and despair beckon.
Huxley, a polymathic novelist, essayist and social commentator, used his novel to explore the implications of a future society which has rid itself of most of what we would consider social evils. He realized that, in order to ensure one kind of human happiness and the eradication of many of the ills that plague contemporary society, so much of our humanity would be lost that the losses would outweigh the gains. His clear-sighted, unsentimental vision of a possible future is one of the great 20th-century dystopias and one that seems to have growing relevance in the 21st century.
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