COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS

by eugenics, drugs, Brave New World

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mindless hedonism ALDOUS HUXLEY
and consumerism Chatto & Windus:
seemed to scorn that 1932.
rosy view.
Although it was lauded by some, including
the logician and anti-war activist Bertrand
Russell, the science boosters felt that Huxley
had let the side down. Nature’s reviewer at
the time of publication sniffed that “biology
is itself too surprising to be really amus-
ing material for fiction”. That reviewer was
Charlotte Haldane, whose then husband,
the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, was not averse
to predicting the future himself — but in a
more optimistic vein.
Gradually, as the star of science waned in
the nuclear shadow of Hiroshima and the
cold war, Brave New World came to be seen
as prophetic. But although its status as a clas-
sic of twentieth-century literature is rightly
secure, what it says about technological
development is too often misconstrued.

FEARS FOR THE FUTURE

Huxley’s brave new world leaned heavily on
the technologies that Haldane had forecast in
his essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future
(1924), particularly the idea of ectogenesis
— the gestation of embryos and fetuses in
artificial containers. For Haldane, this was
a eugenic technique that could improve the
human race — as his friend and Aldous’s
brother, the evolutionary biologist Julian
Huxley, also believed. Aldous here, as else-
where, sided with Russell, who had warned,
“I am compelled to fear that science will be
used to promote the power of dominant
groups, rather than to make men happy.”
In a 1932 article, biochemist and Sinophile
Joseph Needham described Brave New World
as a note-perfect realization of Russell’s
concerns.
But Huxley’s dystopia upset some cham-
pions of scientific progress much more
Writer Aldous Huxley in the late 1930s. than it did Charlotte Haldane. H. G. Wells,
whose 1923 novel Men Like Gods served up

IN RETROSPECT
a characteristically glorious scientific utopia,
felt personally offended, allegedly saying “a
writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has

Brave New World

no right to betray the future as he did in that
book”. (Huxley admitted that irritation with
Wells’s book was partly what provoked him
to write Brave New World in the first place.)
So Brave New World did not appear out
Philip Ball reconsiders the mix of dystopian science of nowhere, but was a contribution to a vig-
orous interwar debate about the influence
fiction and satire 50 years after Aldous Huxley’s death. of science on society, not least the roles of
reproductive technologies. That debate was
exemplified by the To-day and To-morrow

W
hen Brave New World was pub- to supply artificial fertilizers, and people essay series — of which Daedalus was the
lished in 1932, science and were starting to fly between continents first — published in Britain by Kegan Paul
technology were widely seen and converse across vast distances. Aldous between 1923 and 1931. Through it, scien-
as holding utopian promise. The first Huxley’s bleakly satirical vision of a techno- tists, philosophers, politicians, artists and
antibacterials were being developed, the cratic, totalitarian state in which the masses feminists engaged deeply in a conversation
Haber–Bosch process had recently begun are engineered into stupefied contentment that has never since been matched.

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 BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT

Within that context, Brave New World can

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be read as a turning of the tide in terms of

perceptions of what science would bring:
from optimism to foreboding. With the ben-
efit of perspective, what should we make of
it now?
The story is set in AD 2540 (or 632 ‘After
Ford’, the god of mass production). A World
State manufactures its citizens by growing
fetuses in bottles according to “Bokanovsky’s
Process”: cloning many embryos from a
single fertilized egg and treating them with
chemical agents during development to pro-
duce a five-tier caste system of intelligence.
Sex is recreational, love is obsolete and the
idea of family is obscene.
Outside this society live small communi-
ties of ‘savages’ who maintain the old ways
of reproduction and religion. One of them,
a young man called John, has become elo-
quent (rather too much so, Huxley admit-
ted) by reading Shakespeare — ­ hence the
quote from The Tempest that gives the book
its ironic title. John echoes Miranda’s naive
phrase as he initially thrills to the prospect Aldous Huxley’s 1958 essay Brave New World Revisited assessed the dystopian vision of his 1932 classic.
of visiting civilization, and then is horrified
by the shallow, hedonistic passivity of its modernist focus on the individual psy- xenotransplantation (the interspecies
citizens. Lacking art, religion and any sort che. Often those concerns are satirical: by grafting or transplanting of organs and tis-
of genuine passion or curiosity, this stag- materializing ideas, their limitations are sues) to cloning, will lead.
nant society has, John says, paid “a fairly revealed. As with Swift, so with Huxley. All the same, one has to admit that Hux-
high price” for its In other words, Brave New World, like ley’s vision was sometimes right on the
empty happiness. He “The book’s most classics of science fiction, is less a money. His state controls its citizens not by
is eventually driven work of invention than one of analysis — it Orwellian repression but through a drug
lasting power
to despair and suicide. is about the present (in this case, the period (soma) administered to engender bovine
The book begins
is as a tale between the wars), not the future. Huxley’s passivity, along with the opiate of consum-
with its most famous about ways target was contemporary fears of totalitar- erism. “A really efficient totalitarian state
set-piece: the human in which we ian communism and fascism, wariness about would be one in which [leaders] control a
‘hatchery’. Decked can lose our eugenics and scientific triumphalism, and population of slaves who do not have to be
out in the “glass and humanity.” anxieties about consumerism (“Our Ford” coerced, because they love their servitude,”
nickel and bleakly is the profanity of choice) and mass docil- Huxley wrote. In his 1958 essay Brave New
shining porcelain of a laboratory”, it houses ity. He hits all these targets with humour World Revisited, he rightly noted that “it
incubators that contain “racks upon racks that has true bite. The real issue is broader now looks as though the odds were more in
of numbered test-tubes”. Thus, Brave New than the details — as Huxley put it, “not the favour of something like Brave New World
World reimagines the old myth of making advancement of science as such [but] the than of something like 1984”. His dystopian
artificial people (anthropoeia) in a form that advancement of science as it affects human state uses non-stop, trivial, sensual distrac-
was appropriate for the early twentieth cen- individuals”. tions to prevent people from paying too
tury: no longer a lone and secretive quasi- much attention to social and political reali-
alchemical pursuit, but an industrial-scale MEANING MISREAD ties. One doesn’t have to be a conspiracy
operation. This is a perceptive revision of What irks me is how persistently the book is theorist to see those enervating distractions
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), although misread as foresight, often for rhetorical and —infotainment, social media, celebrity-
it was anticipated in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play dogmatic purposes. When Louise Brown, dominated news — being useful today to
R.U.R., which described the manufacture of the first baby to be born through in vitro fer- both authoritarian and liberal regimes.
flesh-and-blood ‘robots’. tilization (IVF), arrived in 1978, Newsweek Yet despite such flashes of prescience,
In literary terms, Huxley’s satire is rich, trumpeted her first “lusty yell” as “a cry heard Brave New World is not a cautionary fable
but his story and characters are thin. This round the brave new world”. The spectre of about particular trajectories in science or
is a common feature of science fiction from mass-produced, ‘dehumanized’ citizens was politics. The Central Hatchery is not pro-
Jules Verne to J. G. Ballard, and has led some brandished by bioethicist Leon Kass, from phetic; it is symbolic. Like Frankenstein, the
critics to insist that the genre can never pro- his early opposition to IVF through to his book’s lasting power is as a tale about ways in
duce ‘true literature’. That is to utterly miss thwarting of stem-cell research as the head which we can lose our humanity. These ways
its point. As Robert Philmus argued in Into of George W. Bush’s Council on Bioeth- differ in every age, but the result is much the
the Unknown (1970), science fiction from ics. Brave New World same. ■
Jonathan Swift’s 1726 work Gulliver’s Trav- NATURE.COM has been co-opted
els onwards “draws upon the metaphors For a podcast of as an off-the-shelf Philip Ball is a writer based in London and
inherent in current ideas and transforms Philip Ball on Brave apocalyptic warn- the author of Unnatural: The Heretical Idea
them into myth”. Myth demands sketchy New World, see: ing about where all of Making People.
characters — it has concerns beyond the go.nature.com/hoozdl such advances, from e-mail: [email protected]

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