What Is Brave New World Revisited?
Brave New World Revisited is a short nonfiction book by Aldous Huxley, published in 1958, more than 25 years after his novel. In a series of essays he asks how close the real world has come to the future he imagined, and concludes that it is moving in that direction much faster than he had expected.
It is not a sequel with a story but a set of essays on overpopulation, propaganda, advertising, brainwashing, drugs and education.
| Fact | Answer |
|---|---|
| Author | Aldous Huxley |
| Published | 1958 |
| Type | Nonfiction, a collection of essays |
| Length | About 12 short chapters, usually around 150 pages |
| Main question | Is the world becoming like Brave New World? |
| Huxley's answer | Yes, sooner than he thought |
What is Brave New World Revisited about?
In 1931 Huxley had imagined that a world like his novel's lay perhaps six hundred years in the future. By 1958, after the Second World War, the rise of mass media and the early Cold War, he felt his predictions were coming true within a single century. The book examines the forces pushing modern societies toward control and conformity, and what individuals and democracies can do about them.
↑ Back to the topWhat topics does it cover?
Huxley begins with overpopulation, which he believed would make governments more powerful and people less free. He then discusses over-organization, the way big business and big government reduce individuals to parts of a machine. Several chapters cover propaganda in democracies and dictatorships, the arts of selling through advertising, brainwashing, chemical persuasion through drugs, subconscious persuasion and sleep-teaching, all of which appear in his novel. The last chapters ask what education for freedom would look like and what can be done.
↑ Back to the topHow does it compare his vision with Orwell's?
Huxley contrasts his novel with Orwell's 1984, published in 1949. He argues that control through punishment, as in 1984, was the method of the dictatorships of his day, but that in the long run control through pleasure, distraction and persuasion would prove more effective. That idea is one reason Brave New World Revisited is still widely read and quoted.
↑ Back to the topWho should read Brave New World Revisited?
Readers who enjoyed the novel and want to understand the ideas behind it will find the essays clear and surprisingly modern. It is short, easy to read in an afternoon or two, and often printed in the same volume as Brave New World.
↑ Back to the topMore about Brave New World
Written by Tori Books for readers and students.