Demi Moore Linda as Linda. Naomi Yang Vivian as Vivian. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. Did you know Edit. Trivia The series, at least for season one, was shot at the Llanharan's Dragon Film Studios in Wales, in addition to certain other real world locations serving as exteriors, both for New London and Savageland edited in such a way as to be futuristic. Its likely that the Savage Land landscape was actually somewhere in the UK, most likely Wales, as background details such as the electricity pylons appears to be of the UK design.
Connections Version of Brave New World User reviews Review. Top review. It's not as simple as it seems. Many people seem to dislike it for various reasons. My answer to that: they missed the point. I am interested in reading more of Huxley or if anyone has suggestions to books similar? Liam Murray My copy of the book recommends "Island" which it describes as a utopian version of "Brave New World" and "The Doors of Perception," which covers Hux …more My copy of the book recommends "Island" which it describes as a utopian version of "Brave New World" and "The Doors of Perception," which covers Huxley's experiences with mescaline.
I would've recommended "" and "The Giver," though it looks like you already read those. See all 58 questions about Brave New World…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Brave New World. Nov 17, Stephen rated it liked it Shelves: audiobook , science-fiction , classics , world-in-the-shitter. I need to parse my rating of this book into the good or great , the bad and the very fugly because I thought aspects of it were inspired genius and parts of it were dreggy , boring and living near the border of awful.
In the end, the wowness and importance of the novel's ideas as well as the segments that I thoroughly enjoyed carried the book to a strong 3. The narrative device employed by Huxley of having the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning provide a walking tour to students around the facility as a way to knowledge up the reader on the societal basics was perfect. This was as good a use of infodumping exposition as I had come across in some time and I was impressed both with the content and delivery method.
The reader gets a crash course in world and its history in a way that fit nicely into the flow of the narrative without ever feeling forced. This was easily the best part of the novel for me, and Huxley's mass production-based society of enforced hedonism and anti-emotion was very compelling. Sort of like Now, long jumping to the end of the novel I also thought the final "debate" near the story's climax between John the "savage" and Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, was exceptional.
Thus, a superior 4. Throughout this entire portion of the book, all I kept thinking was The only purpose of this long, long LONG section seems to be to allow the reader to see Bernard Marx do a complete in his views on the society once he finds himself in the role of celebrity by virtue of his relationship with John the savage. Sorry, this just did not strike me as a big enough payoff for this dry, plodding section.
It was a test of endurance to get through this portion of the book, so I'm being generous when I give it a weak 2. I could just have easily summed it up by just saying Bottom-line, I think this is a book that should be read. It's important book and there is much brilliance here.
Plus, it is short enough that the stale boring segments aren't too tortuous to get through. However, as far as the triumvirate of classic dystopian science fiction goes View all comments. Jo This is my sentiment exactly! Captain Late to the party but I wholeheartedly agree with this review. Aug 02, Kemper rated it really liked it Shelves: , dystopia , future-is-now , famous-books , playing-god , sci-fi.
The following review contains humor. If you read it and actually think that I'm being critical of Huxley, try reading it again. Here's a hint. Look for the irony of the italicized parts when compared to the previous statements.
I have to apologize for this review. The concept of this book was so outlandish that I think it made my mind wander, and you may find some odd random thoughts scattered in it. Anyhow, this book was so silly and unrealistic. Like any of this could happen. I really should look into getting that data entry position I saw in the job postings. Subliminal messaging through infancy and childhood also condition people to repeat idiotic platitudes as if they are genuine wisdom. I need to turn that frown upside down.
I should go buy some new ones and throw the old ones out. Should I get a new set of golf clubs? But would I play more if I got new clubs? The population even gets to zip around in their own private helicopters rather than cars.
Man, when are they going to come out with jet packs for everyone. I want my jet pack! Casual sex is actively encouraged. These condom commercials on TV have gotten really racy. Writing is boring. Like a businessman could ever become that popular. Is Steve Jobs making any announcements this week? While everyone seeks to be constantly entertained, all of the entertainment panders to the lowest common denominator.
Hey, Jersey Shore is on! Perhaps the most far fetched idea in this is that the population has been trained to sedate themselves with a drug called soma that relives any potential anxieties and keeps people from thinking about anything upsetting. I want a beer. I guess this Huxley guy might have gotten lucky and predicted a few things, but he was way off base about where society was going.
Feb 07, Madeline rated it it was amazing Shelves: the-list , science-fiction. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in That's almost eighty years ago, but the book reads like it could have been written yesterday. I think I liked this one better than , the book traditionally considered to be this one's counterpart. Not really sure why this is, but it's probably because this one has a clearer outsider character the Savage who ca Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in Not really sure why this is, but it's probably because this one has a clearer outsider character the Savage who can view the world Huxley created through his separate perspective.
In this light, I will give the last word to Neil Postman, who discussed the differences between Orwell and Huxley's views of the future: "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in 'Brave New World revisited,' the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In 'Brave New World' people are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. View all 37 comments. Wow, the anger over this rating! My first post for this book was a quote and a gif of Dean from Supernatural rolling his eyes and passing out.
And people were pissed. How dare I? So I will: This is still one of the most boring emotionless books I have ever read. It seemed like a natural choice after I loved Orwell and Atwood but, my god, Huxley is a dry, dull wri Wow, the anger over this rating!
It seemed like a natural choice after I loved Orwell and Atwood but, my god, Huxley is a dry, dull writer. Another reviewer called this book a "sleeping pill" and that is a fantastic description. After all the hullabaloo with my original post, I borrowed Brave New World from my local library with the intention of reading it again to give a more detailed review for those freaking out in the comments.
And I returned it after suffering through only a few pages. A few years later I got the ebook, thinking I would eventually make it through somehow. But I haven't. It's so mind-numbingly dull. I don't want to do it to myself.
The Globalization of World Politics was more enjoyable than this book. Shelves: reviewed-for-fantasy-book-review , sci-fi , 5-star-reads. I want sin. Sex is on tap, everybody should be happy. In this dystopia they are trained from birth to think and feel in a certain way, and, for whatever reason, should they ever deviate from their ordained path, they are fed drugs that induce happiness and serenity; thus, the populace is kept within their desired space, and persist with the tasks they were born to do.
Very few of them even consider that this is wrong; this is all they have known. And to make things even more maniacally clever, all physical and sexual needs are fulfilled completely as everybody belongs to everybody else in every sense with the ultimate goal of people never developing desire. All desire should be fulfilled, nobody wants for anything else. People are machines and houses are factories.
They are mass produced and designed to be one thing and one thing only. All values are inverted. The idea of showing any emotion is horrific and repulsive. Love is unknown and alien. Death is associated with sweetness and relief. Children are fed candy when they are thought about death, so they associate the two together, so when as adults they see death they think of treats rather than the loss of someone they have known and worked beside for years.
In Brave New World people are husks, empty and detached, without ever realising it. Like all effective dystopian societies, reading and information plays an exceedingly important role. As with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit , all books have been destroyed and made inaccessible.
John, one of the few characters who was born away from the new world, stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare and it changes his life. He can only think and feel in Shakespearean language and begins to view the world through a semi-romantic lens and only finds depravity when he walks into the new world.
He has been termed the savage, though he knows and understands the real meaning of the term even if those who call him such do not. Naturally, he becomes depressed and isolated in this new space, a space that he cannot be a part of or accepted in not that he would want to be. And I found him by far the most interesting and compelling character within the story because he is the only one to really look beyond the boundaries of his own experience and to find it wanting.
View all 18 comments. Feb 29, Erin added it Shelves: ew-high-school-english. I know i'm going to get slammed for saying this later, especially because i never do actual reviews or completely delve into what i'm thinking so shoot me but haven't you ever been roaming the world wide inter-web and found a little troller you thought "well, this person is a poor use of a human brain? View all 56 comments. Published in The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF After Ford AD in the Gregorian calendar , where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes or castes based on intelligence and labor.
Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex.
His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called Soma.
Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society.
View all 5 comments. Nov 13, Lyn rated it it was amazing. This set the stage about what a dystopian story should be or not be. Sixteen years before Orwell's but eleven years after We by Yevgeny Zamyatin , this is a high water mark for the genre, many of its themes could be told today. Truth be said, this could be published today and wou This set the stage about what a dystopian story should be or not be.
Truth be said, this could be published today and would be just as good, it rises to the challenge and then towers above it. Huxley does more than describe a bleak and cynical post-apocalyptic or dystopian world, he looks a dystopian resident in the eye and puts before him a mirror to flesh out what is real and unreal. Further, Huxley has turned that same mirror on the reader and we see in his far future fantasy a reality that could be today.
Huxley reveals that the seeds of Mustafa Mond and his ilk have fertile ground in our culture and in our souls. The world that has been crafted for the denizens of Huxley's nightmare landscape is explained fully and matter-of-factly by Mond. Huxley's sermon is delivered as stoically and deterministically as Jonathon Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". Huxley, perhaps more so than Orwell, has crafted a domain wherein the individual has succumbed to the will of the state.
Most of all in this reading is the characterization of John and of his juxtaposition with him as a product of the savage reservation and of his alienation in the London of the brave new world. In John, Huxley has created a shadow of Miranda from The Tempest, and the civilization he finds is one that he ultimately rejects in favor of the most extreme form of individual choice.
Timeless and important. View all 32 comments. Apr 17, Johannes rated it it was ok Shelves: literature. This book presents a futuristic dystopia of an unusual kind. Unlike in Orwell's , Huxley's dystopia is one in which everyone is happy.
However, they are happy in only the most trivial sense: they lead lives of simple pleasures, but lives without science, art, philosophy or religion. In short, lives without deeper meaning. Although people are expected to work hard and efficiently during working hours, during off hours people live in an infantile way, never engaging their minds, and satisfying This book presents a futuristic dystopia of an unusual kind.
Although people are expected to work hard and efficiently during working hours, during off hours people live in an infantile way, never engaging their minds, and satisfying themselves with sex and drugs. The premise of the book I find quite interesting. However, the execution is lacking. The characters are not particularly endearing, and indeed they are quite flat. Worse, Huxley fails to explain why this future of controlled contentment is wrong.
The reader will intuit that the this indeed a dystopia posing as a utopia, but Huxley's reliance on this feeling is a philosophical failure. It is the burden of the author to present us not with an account of something we know is bad, but to explain the source of the knowledge. Huxley attempts something akin to an explanation in the second-to-last chapter, a discussion between "the Savage" who grew up outside civilization and Mustalpha Mond, a World Controller.
During the conversation, Mond refers to philosopher Francis Bradley and credits him with the idea that philosophy is "the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. However, I find this deeply unsatisfying. Why write a book to tell people what they already know? Moreover, a single reference to Bradley is not sufficient to convince me that this definition of philosophy is correct.
If Huxley's novel relies heavily on this idea, he should have supported it with more than a solitary statement of Mond. Indeed, Mond promptly refutes the statement by denying instinct as separate from conditioning, and as the civilized population of the world seems to be controlled largely by conditioning, it would seem that in Huxley's world, Mond is correct! In summary, Huxley crafts an interesting future world where people are blithely content without knowing passion or pain.
Unfortunately, he fails both to craft an interesting story to set in this world and to write a strong philosophical argument why such a world would be harmful for mankind. He relies on the obvious faults of the world and the intuitive reaction of the reader, and thus provides no deeper insights.
As a social message, as a novel, and as a statement on the way in which mankind should behave, I find Brave New World inferior in almost every way to The one word of praise I will give to Huxley's novel is that his dystopia is more unusual and more intriguing than Orwell's.
If only he had dome something more with it. At the time he was writing Brave New World he was still in shock from a visit to the United States, where he was particularly frightened by mass consumerism, its group mentality and its vulgarities. I use the word "dreamed" advisedly, because Brave New World - gulped down whole - achieves an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination.
All is surface; there is no depth. As you might expect from an author with impaired eyesight, the visual sense predominates: colours are intense, light and darkness vividly described.
Sound is next in importance, especially during group ceremonies and orgies, and the viewing of "feelies" - movies in which you feel the sensations of those onscreen, "The Gorillas' Wedding" and "Sperm Whale's Love-Life" being sample titles. Scents are third - perfume wafts everywhere, and is dabbed here and there; one of the most poignant encounters between John the Savage and the lovely Lenina is the one in which he buries his worshipping face in her divinely scented undergarments while she herself is innocently sleeping, zonked out on a strong dose of soma, partly because she can't stand the awful real-life smells of the "reservation" where the new world has not been implemented.
Many utopias and dystopias emphasise food delicious or awful; or, in the case of Swift's Houyhnhnms, oats , but in Brave New World the menus are not presented. Lenina and her lay-of-the-month, Henry, eat "an excellent meal", but we aren't told what it is. Beef would be my guess, in view of the huge barns full of cows that provide the external secretions. Despite the dollops of sex-on-demand, the bodies in Brave New World are oddly disembodied, which serves to underscore one of Huxley's points: in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.
Meaning has in fact been eliminated, as far as possible. All books except works of technology have been banned - cf Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit ; museum-goers have been slaughtered, cf Henry Ford's "History is bunk".
As for God, he is present "as an absence; as though he weren't there at all" - except, of course, for the deeply religious John the Savage, who has been raised on the Zuni "reservation", where archaic life carries on, replete with "meaning" of the most intense kinds. John is the only character in the book who has a real body, but he knows it through pain, not through pleasure. The "comfort" offered by Mustapha Mond - one of the 10 "controllers" of this world, direct descendants of Plato's guardians - is not enough for John.
He wants the old world back - dirt, diseases, free will, fear, anguish, blood, sweat, tears and all. He believes he has a soul, and like many an early 20th-century literary possessor of such a thing - think of the missionary in Somerset Maugham's story, Miss Thompson, who hangs himself after sinning with a prostitute - he is made to pay the price for this belief. He does, in fact, provide a third sort of life - that of the intellectual community of misfits in Iceland - but poor John the Savage isn't allowed to go there, and he wouldn't have liked it anyway, as there are no public flagellations available.
The Huxley of comes up with another sort of utopia, one in which "sanity" is possible. By this, he means a kind of "high utilitarianism" dedicated to a "conscious and rational" pursuit of man's "final end", which is a kind of union with the immanent "Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahmin". No wonder Huxley subsequently got heavily into the mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, thus inspiring a generation of s dopeheads and pop musicians to seek God in altered brain chemistry.
His interest in soma, it appears, didn't spring out of nowhere. Meanwhile, those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, 75 years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?
The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well. It's still as vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it. Its New London society is so stuffed with obvious villains that of course it has to come crumbling down however fun its pansexual dance-floor orgies might look.
But maybe a dilution is the best we can hope for. Or maybe the novel works best as a set of building blocks. It takes the form of pleasure and safety and a willingness to abdicate responsibility and individuality to maintain the status quo, no matter who gets reduced to a figure in an equation in the process. So far, no creator has been able to do that. Verno and KOC also touch on the Pacers-Jazz game that resulted in four ejections and discuss a side effect of the higher level of physicality in the game.
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