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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually read as a satire on eugenics. But it addresses a wide variety of themes so successfully as to remain fascinating to later modern readers. This chapter contextualizes the work, and illustrates the degree to which it should be read as, in part, an anti-Bolshevik novel. The development of Huxley’s ideas after this, up to his utopia, Island (1962), is also assessed in terms of a series of efforts to confront the themes of his greatest work.

This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in Brave New World, from a popular women's romance novel to William Shakespeare to race cinema and nature documentaries. It looks at Huxley's vision of futurity, or, as he called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure. Just as D. H. Lawrence's work registers the attraction of the material he claims to reject, the engineered pleasures in Brave New World, including the feelies, exert a frivolous, sleazy magnetism that often contradicts the novel's argument against careless hedonism. The totalitarian culture that is meant to be repellent is secured by a wide variety of vernacular pleasures that are, from a readerly perspective, paradoxically engaging. The chapter explains how this irony is extended in Huxley's subsequent adaptation of Brave New World to a musical comedy.

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.

Chapter 2 takes a disability studies approach to aging by viewing Brave New World (1932) as a thought experiment that explores the value of old age. Reading the novel alongside Ezekiel Emanuel’s claim that it would be best for everyone to die at around age seventy-five, before their abilities begin to decline, the chapter reads the absence of old people in the World State as an aspect of its dystopia. The chapter first argues that the persistent youth embraced by the society robs life of its narrative arc and thereby of an important aspect of its meaning. It then explores the reasons suggested by the novel that such a sacrifice of life narratives is not worthwhile, even to avoid periods of possible disability or frailty. Brave New World makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs.

The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered in this study, who was the first to take a distance from events and from the particularities of the Revolution and the League to ask what a future, world state might look like.

In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ‘accumulating drops of allusion and quotation’ represent not only a literary style but also ‘the characteristic universe’ of his fictional parties, ‘where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent’. Serial sexual encounters at parties, together with the taking of narcotics, figure ‘paralysis and obsessive return’, while the ‘repetitions and rituals’ of ‘enforced sociability’ occasion psychic damage. Linking these symptoms in Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) to Huxley’s vision of modernity, Shiach explores how Huxley’s textual strategies mimic party behaviours.

This chapter traces the history of utopian depictions of surveillance before Nineteen Eighty-Four. It argues that we understand Orwell’s novel better when we see it in terms of a long tradition of such works that have from at leas the time of Thomas More in the 16^th century have represented and critically analysed social structures and processes, as well as their relationships to individuals and groups. Inherently, utopias are speculative, testing out good and bad possibilities for readers (and, later, for film goers), enabling them to contemplate the worlds they inhabit and to think about optional ways of being, both individually and socially. Concentrating on this genre, the chapter suggests, uncovers a focused, historically- and imaginatively rich body of works that present a valuable array of depictions and analyses.

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or artificial womb. Close reading demonstrates how the novel proves more complex than initial readings might suggest in its careful working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator for parenting, motherhood, and the duty of care towards the young. The chapter argues how the existence of Athos with the wider Vorkosigan series is significant, part of an ongoing and series-wide project by Bujold to demonstrate the range of possible futures that the uterine replicator might permit. At various points, Ethan of Athos is brought into conversation with Huxley’s Brave New World to contrast Bujold and Huxley’s visions of reproductive futurities. The chapter shows how Bujold’s saga-length project of creating a diverse science-fictional heterotopia involves a thorough working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator, of detaching reproduction from a gestational body, in which Ethan of Athos plays a necessary part.