Brave New World – 60 second recap

Here’s a fun and useful site – 60 second recap. You might want to start with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – it looks at the main aspects using text and video. This is a bit from the plot section.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World there’s no pain or discomfort or anything remotely unpleasant. Everyone is content. Citizens of this perfect society are programmed from birth to accept their destiny, whether it be as a lowly Epsilon, or as a mentally and physically perfect Alpha Plus. They’re programmed to be uber-consumers, which of course means that the economy in their society is in perfect shape, too. And socially? Well, let’s just say that there’s enough sex and drugs to keep everything purring.

Unfortunately, as in any “perfect” society, there are a few people who begin to question just what they’ve sacrificed to achieve this “Brave New World.” Questioning leads to action. Action leads to a blip in the perfect order of things. But don’t worry, the rulers of Brave New World’s ultra-creepy World State have everything under control…

‘Everybody is happy now’

Margaret Atwood on Brave New World. Have a read.

“O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” – Miranda, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, on first sighting the shipwrecked courtiers

In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state – a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.

The other was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism – one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.

Which template would win, we wondered. During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race.

Read the rest here.

Societal Consequences of Human Genetic Engineering

Thank you to Marcel and Aidan who told me about the Genetics and Literature blog. Check it out as it has several posts that reference Gattaca and there is lots on genetic engineering, genetic discrimination, eugenics … and so on. Also material on other texts including Brave New World and Blade Runner.

Here’s an extract from a post on the societal consequences of human genetic engineering:

Section 15 of NOVA’s program, “Cracking the Code of Life,” utilises popular film and television scenarios to relate to its audience the potential possibilities of future genetic modification of humans. In a scene from GATTACA, the doctor explains the process of choosing “simply the best” of the two parents’ DNA to create their child in a petri dish. According to Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and current director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that technology is “right in front of us – or almost in front of us.”

Read more here.

Brave New World and Gattaca

Connie asked a great question in class today about what texts to link to Gattaca. An obvious choice is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In terms of subject matter there are clear similarities – the influence of scientific discoveries on the individual, the desire to create a utopian society that in fact becomes a dystopia, institutionalised discrimination and the celebration of the individual.

If you want to read more on Brave New World try somaweb – lots of links on Huxley  (that’s him in the photo) and Brave New World.