Key themes
- Pleasure as a form of control
- Freedom versus stability and happiness
- The loss of individuality through conditioning
About this book
A future engineered for comfort and conformity; the other great dystopia, warning against pleasure rather than fear.
Published in 1932, Brave New World was written in four months as a satirical response to utopian fiction. Huxley later revisited its predictions in a non-fiction work, Brave New World Revisited.
Discussion questions
- The World State provides stability, pleasure and the absence of suffering at the cost of freedom, art and depth. Is this a straightforwardly bad trade, or does Huxley take the other side seriously?
- John the Savage comes from outside the system and is destroyed by it. Is he a hero, a victim, a romantic anachronism — or does the novel resist giving him a fixed role?
- Mustapha Mond has read everything forbidden, knows exactly what has been sacrificed. What is Huxley saying by making the system's enforcer its most articulate critic?
- The novel was written in 1931. Which aspects of the World State feel closer to your own world than Huxley could have anticipated?
- Huxley later said he wished he had given John a third option — neither the World State nor the Reservation. What might that third option look like — and does the novel's bleakness feel earned?
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