Both 1984 and Brave New World depict dystopian societies, but they are as different as night and day.  While 1984 is a harsh world under constant fear of Big Brother, the citizens of Brave New World are relatively free and live the best and most painless life possible. Yet underneath the façade, Aldous Huxley manages to take the image of a perfect world and corrupt its beauty.

To start with, Brave New World has abolished families and child birth. Every human being outside the “savage” minority left in the world is made in bottle, raised by the government, and taught to view families as an indecency of the horrid past. Human clones are mass produced as little more than slave workers, stunted at birth to be incapable of doing anything but their predesignated jobs. But possibly the worst aspect of this system, every last human, even before birth, has brainwashed to accept racism, polygamy, the caste system, as well as anything the government decrees unquestionably and with great enthusiasm. The clones and the lower classes are so warped that they enjoy the hours of mindless work and accept the discrimination.

But the horrors don’t end there. Happiness has been transformed from the goal of every society to a prison binding the individual. Everyone must be happy at all times of the day, even when a loved one has died before your eyes.  In fact, the government has abolished love, families, science, and art because it fears people would lose their happiness attempting to seek something meaningful in life. And in case someone is incapable of suppressing a horrific tragedy, drugs are mass produced and handed out by the government to every citizen on a regular basis. One drug developed by the government, Soma, puts a person in a perpetual state of happiness at the cost of slowly shortening their lifespan.

Even though Brave New World succeeds at illustrating Huxley’s horrific future, it succeeds at little else. The characters within the novel are all symbols and archetypes Huxley uses to make a philosophical point rather than real and believable human beings. The characters hardly develop out of their base aspects and the little growth they achieve is for the sake of representing Huxley’s philosophy. Another problem is the descriptions of Brave New World’s polygamous nature. The extensive descriptions of the characters’ sexual lives serve only to bury the novel beneath a layer of unnecessary details.

For 11 AR points and at a reading level of 7.5, I can only recommend this book if you happen to be genuinely interested in the philosophy behind the novel. Brave New World does an incredible job at creating a strange and wonderful world portraying the worst aspects of scientific and political evolution, but it only serves its role as a warning and little else.