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Saturday 23 June 2018

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Reread this old classic.  I find his style a bit hard to wade through - always a tendency towards a didactic or ideological tone.  Social control instruments - sex and drugs.  Prescient in its own way when you look particularly at the U.S. and, to a lesser degree, Europe.  I would say this book is partly the result of Huxley's encounter with American culture, particularly in California and Hollywood once he moved there. (But then, dystopias are usually more about their own time than any future time...)
His view is more valid for the years preceding 2000/2010.  Right now I would say the emerging world situation is closer to the dystopias of Animal Farm, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 - more about fear as direct social control, less about bread and circuses as social palliation. 

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