Review: Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't think I really understood this book. That may be because I read the second half while on lots of painkillers, and had a lot of trouble concentrating, but idk. It seems to be saying that technology is bad, fire is scary and Thomas Edison was a witch?? Maybe not, but sort of.

Let it be known that I decided to read this because I heard the future society in Demolition Man was based on this book, so it's not like I'm a deep person to begin with.

I mean some parts of the dystopia is obv pretty horrible, like never being allowed to be alone. To an introvert like myself that part seems absolutely awful. The sleeping around thing, not so much though. Conditioning people to love every part of their life doesn't sound great either, because I don't think anyone can be truly happy if they never experience any bad things at all. Though that doesn't meant people should spend all the time feeling miserable, ofc.

The plot was a bit off, I was really excited to get to the see savage reservation, but I was let down. It felt ... very off. And how someone could just randomly be left there with no one really caring for them seemed weird, and how pregnancies could just happen despite being the weirdest most disgusting thing in the utopian/dystopian society? I had expected something else.

But the first part, where it was mostly world-building, was really good. But that was the part I read before the painkillers, so maybe I'm just not in a good position to judge.

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True story.