Biographical note:

ALDOUS HUXLEY, born in 1894, wrote some of the most famous and enduring books of the twentieth century. His works include the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as the nonfiction volumes The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. He died in Los Angeles in 1963.

About the Introducer: JOHN SUTHERLAND is the author of seventeen books on literature and language, a regular columnist for The Guardian, and an emeritus professor at University College, London.

Country of final manufacture:

DE

Excerpt from book:

Excerpted from the Introduction


INTRODUCTION
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"With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about? Too much happiness."

(Disgruntled reviewer of Brave New World )




Brave New World is not strictly a novel of ideas in terms of Philip Quarles’s much-quoted definition in Huxley’s Point Counter Point: ‘the character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is a mouthpiece’. As in much satire and science fiction, the characters in Brave New World have little ‘character’, as such. But the novel is an exuberant playground for ideas, the bulk of them dropped in raw from the author’s recent, voracious, reading. Brave New World is also a prime vindication of the veteran science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss’s argument that his genre is rarely ‘prophetic’ – a forecast (accurate or inaccurate) of the future. It is, typically, Aldiss argues, ‘prodromic’.2 That is, SF and dys/u/topian fiction is symptomatic of the present in which it is written. Or, to put it equationally, 1984 = 1948 And Huxley’s novel is similarly more concerned with AD 1932 than far-off AF 632, when the action of Brave New World is ostensibly set. It was, in its day, a novel of the day.

Brave New World is also a highly argumentative novel. Throughout Huxley picks intellectual fights. Three of the fights are central:

1. Huxley versus Henry Ford
2. Huxley versus D. H. Lawrence
3. Huxley versus ‘the Jazz Age’

First, what literary debts does Huxley owe? There are many but the only one he acknowledged was to H. G. Wells whose Men Like Gods (1923) Brave New World specifically controverts (or whose ‘leg it pulls’, as he put it).3 Huxley objected to the conflictless nature of Wells’s utopia, inhabited as it exclusively was by Aò specimens of humanity. But despite his proclaimed differences with Wells, Huxley took over from the other author the idea of the supranational world state and its Controllers’ Council (both writers were inspired by the recently set up League of Nations). It was very much a vision of the time and the time’s thinkers were in two minds as to whether superstates were a good thing or not. We’re still in two minds (viz. the recent fierce pro-and-con ‘debates’, currently raging as I write, over the European Union).

In an essay in Tribune in January 1946, George Orwell inferred that Huxley ‘must have come into contact (presumably via French translation) with Yevgeni Zamyatin’s anti-Soviet-totalitarian We (Nous Autres)’. This source seems unlikely, or not as important as Orwell thought (he was currently meditating Nineteen Eighty-Four which is very derivative of We). Brave New World’s strongest pedigree line seems to ascend via Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1910) to the nineteenth-century socialist fables of Edward Bellamy and William Morris. But Huxley was strongly antipathetic to the politics of Fabian utopianists like Wells and George Bernard Shaw (‘one of the very few writers “A brilliant tour de force . . . Full of barbed wit and malice-spiked frankness . . . Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling.” —THE OBSERVER
 
“Ingenious wit, derisive logic and swiftness of expression . . . Huxley’s resources of sardonic invention have never been more brilliantly displayed.” —THE TIMES (LONDON)
 
“The Utopia to end Utopias.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES
 
“An exuberant playground for ideas . . . Brave New World (like Nineteen Eighty-Four) is a novel part of whose instinctive horror is generated by the fact that it foresees a world where novels are no longer possible . . . Brave New World presents itself as a measure of what would be lost in the brave new world of AF 632. No more novels, no more Huxleys. A darker than dark age is coming . . . In the meanwhile Brave New World remains the most readable of grumpy dystopias.”
—from the Introduction by John Sutherland