Huxley's dark view of the future opened a new door in fiction and seemed to revive interest in the old traditional utopian form by giving it a modern edge. Readers have also used the word "dystopia," meaning "bad place," to describe Huxley's fictional world and others like it. Huxley himself called his world a "negative utopia," the opposite of the traditional utopia. The brave new world of Huxley's novel is not a "good place," and so it is not, in the strictest terms, a utopia. What began as a parody turned into a novel of its own - Brave New World. When Huxley read Wells' Men Like Gods, he was inspired to make fun of its optimism with his characteristically ironic wit.
Wells held an optimistic view of the future, with an internationalist perspective, and so his utopias reflected the end of national divisions and the growth of a truly humane civilization, as he saw it. Wells, author of The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), A Modern Utopia (1905), and many other novels. In Huxley's time, the most popular writer of utopian fiction was H.G. In utopian fiction, imagination becomes a way to explore alternatives in political, social, and religious life. Yet throughout the narratives, Swift employs his fictional worlds ironically to make serious arguments about the injustices of his own Britain. Gulliver's Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift, seems at first to be a book of outlandish travel stories. Since then, writers have created utopias to challenge readers to think about the underlying assumptions of their own culture. More used his fictional Utopia to point out the problems present in his own society. "Utopia," from the Greek words for "no place" and "good place," first came into English in Sir Thomas More's work Utopia (1516), a fictional account of a far away nation whose characteristics invite comparison with More's England. In constructing an imaginary world, Huxley contributes to a long tradition - the utopian fiction. Huxley's future vision, by turns witty and disturbing, imagines the end of a familiar, traditional life and the triumph of all that is new and strange in the modern world. And if Model T's roll off the assembly line in the present, in a stream of identical cars, then in the future, human beings will be mass-produced, too. Questioning of religious beliefs and the growth of materialism, likewise, transforms into a religion of consumerism with Henry Ford as its god. Movement toward socialism in the 1920s, for example, becomes, in Huxley's future, the totalitarian World State. At a period of great change, Huxley creates a world in which all the present worrying trends have produced terrible consequences. Sexual rules may change, Huxley tells his readers, but the power of convention remains the same.Īlthough set in the future, then, Huxley's Brave New World is truly a novel of its time. Huxley, with typical wit, uses the issue for irony, creating an image of the young Lenina being scolded for her lack of promiscuity. Some hailed this change as the beginning of true individual freedom, while others condemned it as the end of civilization itself.
Dress, language, and especially fiction expressed a greater openness for both women and men in their sexual lives. The period also brought a new questioning of traditional morality, especially regarding sex.
The nightmare vision of the fast-paced but meaningless routine of Brave New World reflects this widespread concern about the world of the 1920s and 1930s. While people in industrialized societies welcomed these advances, they also worried about losing a familiar way of life, and perhaps even themselves, in the process. With the new technology, distances grew suddenly shorter and true privacy rarer. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication - the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production - also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. Huxley and his contemporaries wrote about changes in national feeling, questioning of long-held social and moral assumptions, and the move toward more equality among the classes and between the sexes. British society was officially at peace, but the social effects of the Great War, as it was then called, were becoming apparent. Huxley wrote Brave New World "between the wars" - after the upheaval of the First World War and before World War II.
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