This book has been switched on and off the 52 list countless times, so my blog post here has been delayed since I didn't know if it was a blog book or not
Brave New World is a book that describes a "perfect" society, Things such as poverty, starvation, war, etc... have all been eliminated. On the other hand, things such as creativity, personality, free will, etc... have also been crushed
People in this society aren't born, they're made. Thousands of clones are created to have specific levels of intelligence and physical strength. They are then conditioned from the day they are "born" so that they will be perfectly content with the job they have been created for. They are also conditioned to hate books and nature, because the books may ruin their other conditioning, and nature lovers don't increase production, so there is no reason to let them love nature.
I could go on and explain the system for the duration of a book, but that's been done by the author already, so I think I've given a basic overview.
One more aspect worthy of note, people are conditioned to not only love their work, but to love "erotic play" and "soma." Erotic play is just a fancy way of saying flirting and seducing. Soma is a drug that everyone takes in order to have a drug induced vacation.
The conflict in this book occurs when a man from the "savage reserve," which is closer to our society in structure, and closer to an Indian technology level, is brought into the "civilized world"
Obviously problems occur when someone without all the conditioning others have is brought into this conformist society. This is the thing driving the plot of the book onward to it's eventual conclusion.
Now that I have given a book review of the book, lets move on to a question that I know my mom will ask in her comment if I don't answer it now.
"Would you be happy in this perfect world?"
My answer is that I don't know. I imagine that if I received all the conditioning of someone in Brave New World I would be happy. That's the point of the conditioning, but this happiness is artificial and thus false. As someone from the outside of this world looking in, I can't imagine being happy in it. Sure the constantly having girls trying to seduce me would be nice, but everything else would be miserable unless I was conditioned to love it.
The thing I liked most about this book is that it offered a glance at a world that is, in a sense, perfect, but at the same time it made that world seem so strange that it becomes repulsive to the reader, when the society doesn't really have anything wrong with it, it's just so different from what we know that our minds refuse to accept it.
I would certainly recommend this book to a sci-fi reader, it can be confusing at times, but all in all it was a good read.
Warning, this book is suggestive, parental discretion advised
I always wanted to say that
Until next time folks
cmd1095
