Brave New World is a dystopian novel written by English author Aldous Huxley. The book was written in 1931 and published in 1932, and is often compared to George Orwell’s 1984. The story is futuristic in nature and looks at the dehumanization of human beings and their subordination to man’s inventions, science technology, and social organization.
The novel starts in the London Hatchery and conditioning center, in the year a.f 632 (632 years after Ford). The director of Hatcheries and Conditioning takes a group of students on a tour of the Hatchery to give them an idea of how humans are manufactured.
In this futuristic society, the Hatchery is where new humans are manufactured by employing the Bokanovsky’s Process, a fictional process of human cloning, where one fertilized egg produces between 8 to 96 “buds” that will grow into identical human beings. The tour then moves on to the Bottling Room, the Social Predestination Room, and the Decanting Room.
In Brave New World, society is organized by castes, the Alpha caste, which is the ”best” caste to belong to, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, the lowest caste. Long, meaningful and intimate relationships are discouraged, and belonging to more than one person as they describe it in their society was not frowned upon, as everyone belonged to everyone else.
In the story, the director goes on to explain the bottling room is where they control the embryo’s growth to produce the exact class of citizens they desire. Henry Foster the person in charge of the bottling room, is asked by the director to explain the bottling process to the students on the tour of the facility, he states that nothing is more destabilizing to society than unhappy people, and they avoid this by preconditioning the embryos.
The heat conditioning room is used to precondition the embryos. This room consists of hot and cold tunnels, and those exposed to the cold, end up having a dislike for it, therefore they willingly emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and steel workers. The director explains this is designed to make people like their unescapable social destiny. Along with preconditioning the populace is given a substance called soma to keep them happy and pliable.
Bernard Marks the main character in the novel, is a sleep-learning specialist at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. He has a bit of a reputation and is an outlier, the only one who struggles to accept his faith in this well-engineered society. Although Bernard is an Alpha-Plus he is unusually short for an Alpha; an alleged accident with alcohol in Bernard’s blood-surrogate before his decanting has left him slightly stunted.
Bernard is in love with Lenina Crowne and decides to take her on holiday to the savage reservation in New Mexico, where the two observe natural-born people, disease, the aging process, other languages, and religious lifestyles for the first time. Whilst on the reservation they meet Linda and her son John. Linda had gone to visit the reservation from the World State and was left behind by her group. Whilst on her visit Linda had become pregnant by Bernards’s boss, the director, and had decided to stay behind out of embarrassment. Bernard devised a plan to take Linda and John back to the World State as retaliation against the director who was planning on exiling Bernard because of his none conformity and protest against the status quo.
On returning to London John reveals himself to the director as his son which caused a scene and the director resigns in shame. John takes the limelight in the rest of the story and like Linda, his mother, he did not have such a happy ending.
