I think this book is amazing because of how it eerily predicted some things that have since happened in our society. One simple example is the use of soma, a drug that people living in the first world use in the novel. In the fifties in America, scientists developed a muscle relaxant called Soma, during an era in which we believed there would be better living through science. Eerily (but not unexpectedly, at least in retrospect), Soma has begun to be abused in our culture, along with other similar drugs. While soma in the novel was never expected to be a painkiller, it was definitely synthetic and pushed on the people to keep them relaxed, and uninterested in real issues that were surrounding them. It was definitely an interesting read.
Curious, that it's probably the latter half of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that gives the book such intellectual immortality and literary distinction. At least the first third, in fact, struck me as being disjointed, random, and almost reckless and willynilly in what, at the onset, seems almost pointless in its contrived weirdness.
While at first struggling to make it through to the real meat and potatoes of Huxley's magnum opus, I was even reminded of having once known an extremely frustrated friend from a previous job, who was a college student at the time, who was being forced (okay, "assigned" - your word for societal conditioning here, as you please, of course) to read Brave New World, and with the turn of almost every page, while slogging methodically through every colorful (though usually bizarre) catchphrase that the author uses to more fully illustrate his version of a totally pacifistic, impotent and pacified (drugged, stoned, rendered mute AND moot) futuristic human populace, the odd recollection of my tortured young student friend just kept coming back to me, time and time again.
"Viviparous." My young friend kept repeating whenever possible, at work. "Do you know what it means?" His instructor was MAKING him read the damn book, he lamented, and just getting through the first few chapters was giving him something suspiciously close to a nervous breakdown. And I must confess, at the time, I was quite mystified, not so much by the word "viviparous" itself (because like all avid readers, I positively love to learn new vocabulary), but the fact that his assigned reading was vexing his struggling, scholastic mind with such profound, torturous ardor.
I'd seen the first telefilm adaptation of BNW as a kid, of course, but simply had no true sense of the depths of my friend's affliction with having to wrap his bewildered mind around the dystopian world of Huxley's imagining, until years later, when I undertook my own journey into the untamed, almost flighty wilderness of the hallucinogenic laced dream-scape presented in the book.
Thankfully, however, I soon found, that if you stick with it, that perplexing Brave New World starts to gradually make a great deal more sense - despite all its artful senselessness and carefully contrived absurdity, that is. But the author never fails to do what all the best writers throughout history have always done. They make you THINK, while (in Huxley's case, anyway) still confounding you with their own seeming inability to practice what they so eloquently preach.
So Brave New World's about the danger that society will one day become so hyper controlled, overly parented (via excessive government interference - thereby making parenthood obsolete and even obscene), sterile, docile and impotent, that humanity cannot help but be reduced to a herd of genetically engineered, assembly line produced cattle. And the author was himself an avowed pacifist. Not that there's anything wrong with THAT, of course. And given that Huxley's highly ordered future certainly isn't what you'd call warlike, he's at least consistent in that regard. But in one other important respect, the contrast between his fiction and his reality seems positively schizophrenic.
Take soma, for example (but for goodness sake, hopefully not literally), Huxley's cure all super-drug of the perpetually stoned masses of the "happy" future. The author's got you convinced that its all a bad, bad, bad idea for mankind, until you read that the dude was into psychedelic substances himself! Like WHAT? That's almost like Charles Manson brainwashing a few handpicked followers to commit random murders in the hopes of inciting a race war, simply because he believes its gonna eventually happen anyway! And Huxley really does give us the blueprint for a truly dystopian future does he not?
Helter Skelter! But Charles Manson wasn't even born when Huxley was writing the book, and "race" certainly doesn't seem to be a problem any longer in his Brave New World of the far flung future. But classicism? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.
So then which Aldous Huxley are we to ultimately put our faith in? The one who so eloquently tells it like it really is (or rather, the way it could be, if we're not extra careful) within the pages of his most highly touted masterpiece, or the guy who took his own share of mind altering substances, and during his own lifetime, did more than most, to lay out the Marxist-esque prototype of the hippie commune, free loving, drugged up 1960s carefree lifestyle, several decades before it got to be counterculture cool?
But let's keep in mind, shall we, that both Huxley and the hippie movement died in the sixties. The author died quite literally on November 22, 1963, of advanced laryngeal cancer, with his passing being aided by a couple doses of "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular," helpfully administered by his wife. The counterculture movement of course went on well into the early seventies, but many scholars argue that its real death knell was sounded on the night of August 8-9, 1969, when Charles Manson's "family" murdered eight month pregnant actress Sharon Tate, her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, and three unfortunate others. Two more murders were committed the following night, and whether the free love loving, "soma" sucking hippies yet knew it or not, the Brave New World would soon be essentially over.
What a magnificent head trip this Brave New World of Aldous Huxley's far flung, far out, dream-questing, melodramatic, prophetic future! What a delightful mental brain-freeze for soma laced ice cream lovers of all generations, past, present, and still, perhaps most frighteningly, yet to come! For let us not forget that so very much of what makes this masterfully told masterwork so fearfully effective, is that so much of it has already, and still continues to cyclically come to pass, in one way or another. So, color me "the savage," I suppose. I'll take my Shakespeare and good old fashioned reality injected pain to my earthly grave, thank you very much. So like this review, lump it, or leave it, as you wish, I suppose. And by all means, have my share of soma if you so choose. While "modern" society still affords you the luxury of free will, that is. Like the poor savage, I don't really need your permission or approval either.
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《Brave New World》热门书评
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你还要些什么
794有用 49无用 drunkpiano 2010-03-17
2503年,一个婴儿养育室里。护士们在地板上摆了一堆图书和鲜花,然后把一群长得一摸一样的、8个月大的婴儿放到了地板上。婴儿们看到图书和鲜花,飞快地爬过去,拿起来玩耍。这时候,长官一声令下,护士长启动电路装...
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美丽新世界——未竟的争论
289有用 10无用 逆转录猴子 2007-09-15
首先说,看这本书来自neil.postman的《娱乐至死》,后来才知道其与奥威尔的《1984》,扎米亚京的《我们》并称为反乌托邦三部曲,在postman看来《美丽新世界》和《1984》描绘的是两个相反的未来,而在读过此书后,我觉得这种相反反而只是表面上的。内在来看,他们描绘的都是又精英统治的所谓稳定...
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《1984》与《美丽新世界》
220有用 12无用 yzw 2013-02-04
曾经有幸参加过一次读书会,主题乔治奥威尔,不外乎是谈《动物庄园》与《1984》。当时在场的更多人是更喜欢《动物庄园》,而我对那本书却没什么很深刻的感觉,只很喜欢《1984》。当然《1984》也是有不少讨论的,一片引申,而我却只在旁听与发呆,基本没有发言。只是现在回想起来,讨论《1984》竟然没人提到...
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越少完美,越多自由
157有用 7无用 惨绿 2005-11-14
一直没有看到过这本书的中文版,也许是托了去年那本《娱乐至死》的福,重庆出版社在新近推出的一套名为经典重现的丛书中,收录了这本书的中译本。这套丛书还收录了一些在西方读者心目中地位甚高,但编者认为被中国读者忽略的文学作品,比如已出的《秘密花园》和《华氏451》,待出的《我们》、《禅与摩托车维修艺术》、《...
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给那些在温水中愉快享受的青蛙们
83有用 8无用 North Laker 2005-08-19
看到对《1984》的评论,让我想起另一本书《美丽新世界》。对1984里描述的令人窒息的独裁场景我已不担心,因为从上个世纪末开始,我们这一代人已经开始翻过那沉重的一页,中国人正头也不回地掠过《1984》的阴影。这本书在二十年前对国人会有振聋发聩的作用,但在半个多世纪后的今天,这本书预言似的描述看起来更...
书名: Brave New World
作者: [英] Aldous Huxley
出版社: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
出版年: 1998-9-1
页数: 268
定价: $12.95
装帧: Paperback
ISBN: 9780060929879