Paperback, 310 pages
English language
Published Nov. 7, 1956 by Modern Library.
Originally published in 1932, this outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before. Cloning, feel-good drugs, antiaging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media -- has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 AF (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, Brave New World is both a warning to be heeded and thought-provoking yet satisfying entertainment.
Read in and for English class in school. Would likely not have read it on an other occasion, although the themes and things discussed are thought provoking, I didn't really enjoy the book.
Die gesamte Dystopie ist sehr interessant und erschreckend, verliert sich aber leider dermaßen in detailierten, montonen Beschreibungen das ich aus langeweile immer wieder abschweifte und ganze Kapitel zum Teil noch einmal anhören musste. Leider ändert auch die zugrunde liegende Story daran nichts, da diese für mich so wirkt als habe Huxley sie im nachhinein eingearbeitet, um seinen Ideen irgendwie einen roten Faden zu verpassen, damit aus seinem Buch kein philosphisches Sachbuch sondern ein Roman wird.
There is much to be learned from reading this book and it is easy to forget that it was written early in the last century, not this one. Sadly, the warnings Huxley offers about what society was becoming were largely ignored and we've come to a society that so closely mirrors his "civilization" that it could have been a metaphor about our current state of affairs written by a contemporary author.
It is a very short novel but full of warnings and lessons that are as applicable, or even more so, today as they were in 1930. It is a lesson in mass manipulation by the media and big pharma. It is a lesson in treating people ultimately as mere resource rather than persons. And it is a lesson in extremes, extreme pain v. extreme pleasure and the wrongheadedness in submitting to either.
