Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

The copy of Brave New World that I read did not have the cover pictured to the left - but this cover was so crazy to me that I couldn't resist uploading it here. Whenever I hear someone talk about this book (which is more often than one might think), I think of the scene in the movie "Garden State" where the three guys are sitting in the cemetary talking about this book, and they can't remember the author's name, and one of the guys says, "I think it's Huxtable" (Bill Cosby's character from the 80's sit-com). Alas, this book is far from humorous. It starts out with a tour of some sort of laboratory where children are being manufactured and trained. It's approximately the year 2500, and women no longer give birth to children naturally. People are created according to a specific class structure - they are bred to perform certain tasks for the benefit of the State and thanks to the wonders of subconscious repetition, are conditioned to accept and appreciate their station in life. In many ways, this reminded me of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This new and improved society is, for some inexplicable reason, however, quite hyper-sexualized. Promiscuity, rather than monogamy, is the favored behavioral pattern, and people regularly take drugs to repress feelings of unhappiness or dissatisfaction. But, there are still pockets of "Savages" - places where people live natural lives - getting fat and growing old. Two of the main characters from the New World go on a vacation to one of these savage outposts in New Mexico - and the scene is reminiscent of a sterotypical Native American reservation. Once I got to this point in the book, I felt as if I'd either read it before or seen something like this in a movie - so it's possible this was not my first exposure to this story. Of course, there is a clash of culture, with the New World folks wondering how anyone could live such a debased existence. And, thus we discover that in the New World, people have completely given up familial relationships, religion, literature - and most of the things in life that generate passion and love. Conceptually, I like the idea of futuristic utopias - but this book didn't quite work for me. It started out quite promising with a theory of where science must take us - but the price Huxley seems to think society would have pay in order to accomodate scientific advancement seems implausible and unnecessary. This seems like the perfect book for high school kids - to jump-start conversations about technology, the role of the humanities in society, family, eugenics, etc. - this is probably the reason most people read this book in high school - but as a self-contained picture of where our world might be going, there are too many loose-ends and the ending is too absurdist to hold together completely.