On the surface it appears to be a comfortable dystopia as the World State is a society that revels in indulgence, parties, drugs and casual sex. This isn’t a dystopia with a secret police and elaborate punishment rituals for dissenters. It has a rigid caste system (that runs from Alpha-Plus down to Epsilon) and social conditioning that makes its citizens choose to conform, rather than them doing so out of the fear of physical violence. It’s a society without monogamy, privacy, family, religion and individualism. The novel is set in The World State (a single all powerful national and political body that controls the human race) in AD 2540 or AF 632 (After Ford) as the characters know the date. Also like The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World has had a recent high profile, big budget TV adaptation (which has since been cancelled after one season). Unlike other novels about the dangers of totalitarianism, such as 1984 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in Huxley’s dystopia the social control is seductive and not aggressively forced on the population. A world where any deviation from what society expects is severely punished.īrave New World has a lot in common with Orwell’s 1984 and both novels are often mentioned in the same breath, despite being published 17 years apart. A world where the needs of society as a whole are paramount and the needs of individuals are subordinate to this. The novel is set in a world where social conditioning forces everyone into rigid roles. It’s one of the go-to texts of the dystopian sci-fi sub-genre and is often reached for as a metaphor for totalitarian societies that seek to crush individual freedom under a smothering blanket of conformity. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a seminal science fiction novel.

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