Brave New World
Just finished reading Brave New World today, as I do have a love for novels outlining bleak dystopian futures that are grounded in today’s society. If it goes a bit too sci-fi/fantasy, I tend to drift off, but if it is something like Brave New World or 1984 or the Robin Williams’ film "The Final Cut," I stay interested.
Written in the 1930s, I think the book held up pretty well. Although, between the two, I would have to side with 1984 as the more realistic of the two, whereby there is knowledge of what is being done with the present to affect the future. In BNW, it is more about creating a future where there is no past. It was interesting that to create the ideal society, there had to be a class system for it to work. everyone couldn’t have one class or else there would be chaos and such. This reminded me of The Matrix, where the Architect said they tried creating a version of The Matrix with no war and such, and it just didn’t work out.
A short book, it didn’t seem to get enough wind in its sails to keep me enchanted, although this might have to do with the fact that the main character shows up about 100 pages into a 200 page book. John The Savage lives in the reservation (same as The Proles in 1984, people who live outside the larger societal structure), the son of a mother who grew up within the artificially constructed society, but was abandoned in the reservation Malpais (which, if I’m not mistaken is just bad country in Spanish? Which would make sense as most of the characters had names that either were or were based on Marx, Lenin, etc. Not really going for subtlety here).
The part I couldn’t understand is, if this kid was raised by someone who is constantly going on about how much better that other, artificial society was… why he was so shocked when he got there. You would think it would be like "So this is what she was always going on about…"
Of course, like any good dystopian text, it is not entirely black and white. For as fake and artificial as that society was, they didn’t have war or anything. They were just raised to be consumerist, pill-popping automatons who didn’t question anything and convinced themselves they were happy. So, save for our inability to stop waging war, we’re getting there.
It is interesting to think that in the 1930s, Huxley had to imagine a society where children were programmed hundreds of times a day to want to consume, and other things that suit a capitalist society. With the invention of TV, and parents using it as their frontline babysitter, this is largely non-fiction anymore.
I did find it strange that the reservation seemed to be much more antiquated versus modern times, in that they performed human sacrifice, and seemed to be far more of a Native American/Mexican/Mayan culture but yet one of the smuggled books the kid grew up reading was the Complete Works of Shakespeare. That seemed to distract me more than engage me, since 1984 only projects a future society, using the present day (when it was written anyway) as the jumping off point. I don’t think the "past" had to shoot back a few centuries and the "future" projected forward. It seems sufficient that readers of that time see themselves squarely in one of the settings to better set up the rest as a cautionary tale. Personally, I’m a big fan of setting up your dystopia for maximum impact, which ensures a majority of readers nail down the point as specifically as possible.
I didn’t read the Brave New World Revisited, which I believe was written by Huxley in the 60s, and was part of the book as purchased, because seeing how it was becoming more true in the 60s seems already too dated at this point, unless someone updates it again on its 70s anniversary coming up. It seemed too late to only chart half of its progress since publication.
This is definitely a genre that continues to fascinate me, although I know that for me personally, it would require a great deal to pull off writing in this genre. I think it would mean an extensive period of time offline for the most part, with no TV, possibly in a country where English wasn’t spoken all that much. Of course, I’ve just described my ideal writing climate for EVERY book I might possibly write. I do think that to write anything of value that holds a mirror up to society, you need to somehow get yourself removed from society to get enough distance to have valuable insight. Otherwise, the biggest image in the mirror is you, right up front and center. (This is not yet another size/body image reference, only a truism about the science of mirrors. If you are in the foreground, and holding a mirror to see what you are a part of, it would have to be behind you).
The best I can probably hope for in this regard is getting out of an urban area in the next decade, although that requires a husband. Someone whack enough to want to do that move as well. We’ll see what happens.
