Fears for the Future (Reading Assignment IV)

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World can definitely be considered a political novel. The story of the novel contains a world full of pleasure and lacking unhappiness and a world where the people live on the land with little technology. The world of pleasure contains a place where humans are grown in test tubes and the young children are conditioned accept sex as a recreational activity. The adults use a drug called soma in order to escape the world and have their own paradise.

The novel can be seen as a reaction to the growing use of sex and drugs in the culture of America. The novel was completed in 1932, after the flappers of the roaring twenties finished their rebellion of the traditional ideas of what a women should wear and do. The book, however, was written before a time where sex and drugs would almost resemble the society of Brave New World, the 1970s. The use of LSD and other drugs as a escape from reality into a personal paradise resembles the activities in the novel. Huxley warned of the change from reproduction to recreation for sex and the increased use of drugs in the every day society of the world. The novel targets the society of the world and attempts to show a new world that may deter or encourage the culture from the path it now began to follow.