Brave New World

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"  This quote is the basis of Brave New World.  In 2540 A.F. (After Ford), England believes that they have created a perfect world, a utopia.  The key to a working society, in their eyes, is stability.  To create and maintain stability, humans are artificially “born” and are sorted into social classes based on their genetic structure.  From birth to adulthood, everybody learns to appreciate their social class, mainly by hearing recordings like the one quoted above for the Beta class.  Through all the lifelong social conditioning, only one person opens his eyes to see that the so-called “utopia” is actually a dystopia. 

This book is definitely an interesting read.  It tops my list as one of the unique books I have read.  The message Huxley is sending is great.  The idea that in the future there will be a government that strips everyone of their rights is a common theme among writers, but Huxley took the theme and built a great story out of it.  Though the book did start out slow (it had to explain a lot about the society), it picked up after a few chapters and kept a fast pace.  Brave New World definitely needs to be read twice because there are many things I missed the first time, like foreshadowing and other messages.  This is an excellent book that I recommend for anyone to read.