Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, 1932
★ 3.98 from 2.2m ratings on Goodreads
An engineered future where comfort is compulsory and happiness is manufactured—and one outsider asks what was sacrificed to get it. A cool, orderly future presses against you, with unease under the comfort and a curious outsider's questions pulling the story along.
Feels like unease, curiosity and wonder. About society, power and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy speculative fiction that tests ideas about control, conformity and freedom. Be warned that some readers find the middle dry and slow, and the characters emotionally flat.
Why read it
It gives you a sharp thought experiment about manufactured happiness and what comfort can cost, and its questions about conformity still feel current.
A page from the book
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers. What readers say
Readers are divided: many find the imagined society chilling, thought-provoking, and uncomfortably relevant, while others find the book dry, slow, and emotionally flat. Its warnings about control, conformity, and lost freedom linger.
Aldous Huxley.Huxley taught French at Eton, where one of his pupils was George Orwell; Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is often read as a reply to this book.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is Brave New World for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy speculative fiction that tests ideas about control, conformity and freedom. Be warned that some readers find the middle dry and slow, and the characters emotionally flat.
- What is Brave New World like?
- A cool, orderly future presses against you, with unease under the comfort and a curious outsider's questions pulling the story along. Feels like unease, curiosity and wonder. About society, power and identity.
- What should I read after Brave New World?
- If you liked Brave New World, try A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess), Animal Farm (George Orwell) and The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood).
A taste of the feed
The endearing details that make a monster seem human.
He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood
What if the punishment you wanted most was remorse, and it never came.
And if only fate would have sent him repentance—burning repentance that would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that repentance, the awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have been life. But he did not repent of his crime.
Crime and Punishment · Fyodor Dostoevsky
The only job that feels worth doing, and why it can't be real.
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.
The Catcher in the Rye · J. D. Salinger
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed