Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (2)

Brave New World

Of all Huxley's novels, Brave New World is the most successful combination of a rich fund of ideas with convincing plot and characters. The title is taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act V), in which Miranda, exiled on an island from early childhood, sees other human beings for the first time, and remarks: " O brave new world that has such people in it!". At first the novel seems to Utopian literature, a work describing an imaginary ideal society. But as it satirizes the scientific utopias of technological and technocratic societies, with their negative consequences, it is better defined as a negative utopia, or dystopia. The style of the novel is also responsible for the great success the novel immediately enjoyed on first publication. It is highly ironic and allusive, rich in references and quotations, especially from Shakespeare, interspersed with scientific terms, Latin and Greek derivatives, specific words drawn from various fields of culture, and allusions to places and people still easy to recognize after so many years (for example we have Marx, Lenin, etc).
Brave New World constitutes a turning point in the development of Huxley's work. Instead of analyzing the condition of the individual in modern society, he now focuses on western civilization at large , for which pessimistically, he foresees a future of self-destruction symbolized in the Savage's tragic suicide.
The main themes he faces may be grouped as follows:

-the effects of scientific progress on the individual;
-the danger of genetic manipulation;
-the use of technology to control human society;
-the worship of technology, to be the detriment of art and the humanities.
-the religious atrophy and materialism of our century , which denies God as "not compatible" with machinery and scientific progress;
-the danger of any sort of totalitarianism or authoritarianism.