Aldous Huxley s Brave New World - 1904 Words

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, is a masterpiece of science fiction. His imagined, dystopian state creatively employs facts and theories of science, as well as his very own thinly-veiled commentary on the future of society. His family background and social status, in addition to molding Huxley himself and his perspective, no doubt made impact on his writing and contributed to the scientific accuracy of his presentation. However, Huxley certainly qualifies as a social commenter and his extensive works, while sometimes biased, were always perceptive comments on the future of mankind, predictions made based on current event in his world. In other words, current affairs had undeniable impact on Huxley’s novel, and his†¦show more content†¦The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication, the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production, also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. With this new technology, distances grew suddenly shorter and true privacy rarer. In Brave New World, such technologies and more have been introduced to The World State, and this society brings to life these exact fears of distance between people: While people in industrialized societies welcomed these advances, they also worried about losing a familiar way of life, and perhaps even themselves. Huxley’s novel also attempts to show how science, when taken too far, can limit the flourishing of human thought: â€Å"The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’ The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.’† (Huxley, 70). In World War I, humanity had seen the great destruction that technology such as bombs, planes, and machine guns could cause. Huxley believed that the possibility for such destruction did not only belong to weapons of war but to other scientific advancements as well, such