| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780060850524 | | Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers | | Publish Date: 10/1/2006 | | Buy.com Sku: 202467929 | | Item#: RC9S4Q | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 68026 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5.5L x 0.75T | | Pages: 304 |
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| | | | "A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories..." (from the first line) Huxley''s story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world''s population, this literary classic is a must-read.
Annotation:
A satirical novel depicting a scientific and industrialized utopia in which Ford and Freud are worshipped, eugenics policies have eliminated class conflicts (while strengthening the division of the classes), and personal unhappiness is assuaged through drugs and pornography.
| PraiseNew York Times Book Review
"He has satirized the imminent spiritual trustification of mankind, and has made rowdy and impertinent sport of the World State whose motto shall be Community, Identity, Stability....So here we have [Mr. Huxley], as entertainingly atrabilious as ever he was...mocking the Fords, the Hitlers, the Mussolinis..." - John Chamberlain 02/07/1996Saturday Review
"Mr. Huxley is eloquent in his declaration of an artist's faith in man, and it is his eloquence, bitter in attack, noble in defense, that, when one has closed the book, one remembers--rather than his cleverness and his wit, which one admires and forgets." |
| Author Bio| Aldous Huxley | | Aldous Huxley was the third son of Leonard Huxley, a teacher, editor, and author, and the former Julia Arnold, a schoolmistress. His paternal grandfather was the famed scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (a noted defender of the theories of Charles Darwin, and the person who coined the term "agnostic"), and a maternal great-uncle was the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. Their grandfather's mantle was taken up by Huxley's older brother Julian, who became a noted biologist. Aldous was planning on a career in medicine; he was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. When he was 14, his mother died of cancer, and three years later Huxley was stricken by an eye infection that left him blind for a year. His eyesight never recovered beyond a return of partial vision in one eye, and this led him to change his plan of studying medicine; instead he studied literature at Oxford. While he was at Oxford, his older brother Trevenen committed suicide. After completing his bachelor's degree in 1916, Huxley worked briefly as a teacher at Eton. He then moved to London and pursued a career as a literary critic and poet. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, who gave birth to their only child the next year, the same year Huxley published his first volume of stories. By 1923, Huxley had published two acclaimed novels, CHROME YELLOW and ANTIC HAY, and his reputation as one of the finest satirists of his time was established. He and Maria spent the next several years living on the Continent, and he continued to publish books, achieving great success with the novels POINT COUNTER POINT and BRAVE NEW WORLD. In 1934, upon the completion of EYELESS IN GAZA, Huxley experienced severe writer's block, along with depression and insomnia. In an effort to cure these afflictions he began practicing meditation and pursuing an interest in metaphysics. Huxley emerged from this dark period the next year, and leaving behind his famed sardonicism, embraced a more idealistic view of human potential. He and his family moved to the United States in 1937, living first at the ranch of his deceased friend D. H. Lawrence, and in 1938 settling in Southern California. Huxley worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood during the late 1930s and 1940s while continuing to write fiction and essays. His interest in metaphysics deepened over the years, and in 1953 he experimented with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline; the results of these experiments are recounted in his book THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION. In 1955, Maria Huxley died. The next year Huxley married Laura Archera, a musician, film editor, and therapist. In his final years, Huxley continued his long-established interest in travel, visiting countries around the world, often lecturing on his ideas. He published his final novel, ISLAND, in 1962, and succumbed to throat cancer the next year, on the same day John F. Kennedy was shot. Huxley is best known in the United States for BRAVE NEW WORLD, which is often assigned reading in secondary schools, but ISLAND--whose model society is much more pleasant than the one found in BRAVE NEW WORLD--also has a durable and devoted following. His early novels are fine portraits of postwar English society, and it is on these that his reputation as a literary stylist rest. The contrast between these early satires and the metaphysical and sociological concerns of his later work is stark, and readers are often fans of either his "English period" or his "American Period," but not often fans of both. No matter what works of Huxley one reads, however, one will find perceptive social observation and elegant prose. He is immortalized with a place in the jacket collage of the Beatles' SERGEANT PEPPER album. |
| | Read A Chapter | Chapter One A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrancethe words, Central London Hatchery and ConditioningCentre, and, in a shield, the World State's motto,Community, Identity, Stability. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards thenorth. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropicalheat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows,hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape ofacademic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel andbleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded towintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their handsgloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen,dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did itborrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polishedtubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession downthe work tables. "And this," said t Click to read more... Chapter One A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrancethe words, Central London Hatchery and ConditioningCentre, and, in a shield, the World State's motto,Community, Identity, Stability. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards thenorth. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropicalheat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows,hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape ofacademic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel andbleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded towintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their handsgloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen,dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did itborrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polishedtubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession downthe work tables. "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the FertilizingRoom." Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers wereplunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning enteredthe room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, so-liloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop ofnewly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously,rather abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried anotebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperatelyscribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare privilege.The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personallyconducting his new students round the various departments. "Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. Forof course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were todo their work intelligently—though as little of one, if they were tobe good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars,as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities areintellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers andstamp collectors compose the backbone of society. "Tomorrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightlymenacing geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work. Youwon't have time for generalities. Meanwhile ... " Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouthinto the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad. Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into theroom. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered,when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old,young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow thequestion didn't arise; in this year of stability, a.f. 632, it didn't occurto you to ask it. "I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the morezealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin atthe beginning. "These," he waved his hand, "are the incubators." Andopening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks ofnumbered test-tubes. "The week's supply of ova. Kept," he explained,"at blood heat; whereas the male gametes," and here heopened another door, "they have to be kept at thirty-five instead ofthirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogenebeget no lambs. Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencilsscurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of themodern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction-- "the operation undergone voluntarily for the good ofSociety, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting tosix months' salary"; continued with some account of the techniquefor preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing;passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity;referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggswere kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actuallyshowed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes;how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides ofthe microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspectedfor abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle;how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptaclewas immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa-- at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousandper cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, thecontainer was lifted out of the liquor and its contents reexamined;how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed,and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to theincubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitelybottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought outagain, after only thirty-six hours, to unde rgo Bokanovsky's Process. "Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the studentsunderlined the words in their little notebooks. One egg, one embryo, one adult—normality. But a bokanovskifiedegg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninetysixbuds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo,and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six humanbeings grow where only one grew before. Progress. "Essentially," the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification consistsof a series of arrests of development. We check the normalgrowth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding." Responds by budding. The pencils were busy. He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of testtubeswas entering a large metal box, another rack-full was emerging.Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes togo through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being aboutas much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptibledivided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all werereturned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then,after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked ... Continues...
Excerpted from Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley Copyright © 2006 by Aldous Huxley. Excerpted by permission.
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