Relationships are banished (included the familial ones). To achieve happiness, everyone’s every move is prescribed, partly by fetal modification and then psychological manipulation in childhood (and even a sophisticated type of osmosis). The goal of the society, which during the book has been going on for a long time, is a happy populace.
Here’s the gist: There has been an event in human history, after which everything changed and the dating system started afresh. It gets awkward.) The book also has less historical or political roots, so it remains more immediate than some other dystopian literature because of that, too. (Think of things like Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999.” These dates pass. And the first intelligent thing that is done in that book is to set it in a time after the present age, so that it could remain possible in time for a long, long while yet.
This time around, I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World first. In actuality, they are very different books, but we’ll get into that in a second. I was in high school when I was assigned 1984 and a college freshman when I read Brave New World for a perspectives class. (Not anymore.) They are also both classics of dystopian fiction and are both books you might be required to read in high school or college. I’m going to review these books together, because they had been all mixed up in my memory.
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