Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I tried to read Brave New World but it just didn’t work. I didn’t like the style of writing; it almost seemed more like a postmodern novel than one published in 1932. I never felt engaged with the characters or story. It is a piece of satire and thus plot isn’t the main driver, but if it’s not a piece of nonfiction, I feel it should have something (e.g psychology, description, or plot) that pulls me, the reader, through the work. It has some good ideas but they would have worked better for me as an essay rather than a story.

I also think that this work falls into the same pit where I think Neuromancer went. Its critique of utopias, commercialization, and making people not care about larger issues once their base issues are dealt with has been covered over and over again since Brave New World was published. Perhaps if I read this back then or at a very early, formative point of my development, I would have liked it better. But, I’ve read countless fictional and factual pieces on dystopia that this one doesn’t stand out.

I was telling someone that all books have ideas, some of those are good ideas, and an even smaller subset are ideas that are timeless. I find Homer (Fagles translation), Steinbeck, Chandler and Camus to be in that category. Those stories are decades or millennia old but still speak to me today. Brave New World didn’t do that for me. I hope it can for others.