Why didn’t anyone tell me…

Well, just finished. Brave New World by Aldus Huxley. Alright, maybe in the ’30s this was crazy hardcore scifi porn (suggesting that people have intercourse is the limit of its graphic nature), but in the new millennium, it just bored me to tears. I barely remember the characters names and it’s only been 3 days since I finished it. Let me spare you the trouble:

SPOILER TIME!

In the future, people are manufactured a-la Ford. All instances of the word “God” or “Lord” are replaced with “Ford”, as he is their deity. This is mainly to piss off the reader. People have purple eyes or something. This is some side effect of the test tube people-growing process (Matrix anyone?), which they are very proud of. Parenting as we know it is a lost art, replaced by – wait for it – pills. All your needs are cared for by pills (watch Equilibrium). Some disgruntled stooge and his floozy go out to go camping and see “natives” in Arizona, and come home with a “civilized woman” that was lost on a camping trip 40 years ago, and her *gasp* natural born son. They return, the woman doses herself to death on the magic pills, and the son is the only person that can feel any sympathy for the dying, so he throws a fit, gets dragged off to the Principal’s office, and they go all poly-sci theory on him for a while. Somewhere along the way he falls in love with the girl that went camping and discovered him, but when she offers to sleep with him for nothing, he calls her a whore and decides that people are scumsucking meatsacks. He decides to go live au-natural off in the fields outside London (hah!). The New World people catch up with him and notice that he’s taken up self mutilation because he’d rather feel pain than make sense. At this point in the book, you’re hoping he hits an artery. It turns into a media circus, he shouts at them, they ask him to hit himself again. The reader cheers with the crowd. The girlfriend-wannabe shows up, boy hits her (presumably killing her, it’s never made clear), and an orgy breaks out. He wakes up and hangs himself.

Real feel-good book there.

The point is, this book, while it may have been somewhere between shocking and progressive during the ’30s, is just pointless now. I can see it as maybe the first place that many people will have encountered some of these ‘ideal society’ ideas, but the modern versions are more current, more polished, and closer to home. Save yourself the time – leave it on the shelf in the public library.