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Well I told you all I’d post a reaction, and I actually started on it about a week after I finished the book. It’s been in draft form ever since. I just couldn’t seem to keep my thoughts together long enough to write coherently about the book. Today I decided to just forget about producing something elegant and put it out there. So here it is!

After finally finishing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I can only imagine the impact this novel had when it was first published in 1932. As valid a commentary today as it was then, BNW is the type of novel that keeps you thinking long after you’ve put it down, and certainly deserves its place as an enduring piece of science fiction. It’s narrative speaks volumes of the human condition – where it is, and where it is headed.

The topic of engineering humans seems to pop up in the mainstream more and more lately, especially since the release of The Matrix and breakthroughs in cloning technology. BNW was written some twenty years before the discovery of DNA, so it focuses not on genetic engineering, but environmental conditioning.

The brilliance of Huxley lies in how efficiency and effectively his writing functions as objective description and sharp criticism simultaneously. The characters residing in his dystopian society were so oblivious to their conditions that readers have no choice but to take notice of the consequences of living life without question. His society had created its own prison, and embraced it because it had the appearance of a healthy, optimal existence.

Definitely a great novel. I almost want to go watch the made-for-TV movie of it now. Supposedly there is also a sequel to the novel, Brave New World: Revisited, that didn’t gain nearly the critical acclaim of the original.

When digging into any recently published science fiction novel, it’s not uncommon to notice subtle (or not so subtle) references to older, “classic” sci-fi authors and characters. Many contemporary authors like to pay homage to those who’ve inspired them by cleverly naming characters or places after them – either directly or subtly by using anagrams. Most often, when a character or place is named in such a fashion, there’s a certain irony to be found – an “inside joke,” if you will, that can only be understood if you recognize the reference. I wish I could provide a concrete example, but bear with me, you’ll soon see this evidenced, though not restricted to the scope of literature.

My personal library (if it could even be called such) isn’t comprehensive by any means, but I have read my share of science fiction novels. Not surprisingly, nearly every one of them contains references to other works. I’m not certain when exactly it was, but at some point in time I finally decided that no longer wanted to be left out of the loop – I wanted understand the ironic implications. Hence, I began to take an interest in classic sci-fi novels.

I began by picking up Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Frank Herbert’s Dune with every intention of reading them quickly. I managed reading two chapters into each and didn’t pick them up again.

Here it is sometime later and I’ve began again on Huxley. It’s been two days and I just started chapter 8. Now where am I going with this, you may ask? For some reason, right around chapter 4, with the introduction of a main character named “Lenina”, the movie Demolition Man crept out of my subconcious. If you ever sat through it, you’ll remember that DM was set in a “utopian” future, where society has been sterilized, crime and suffering are non-existent, and everyone is generally happy. If this sounds all too familiar, it’s because it is the same setting found in BNW, and more recently, the movie Equilibrium (highly recommended flick, BTW). Anyway, in DM, the name of the character played by Sandra Bullock was none other that “Lenina Huxley.”

I can just hear the stunned gasps of realization already. I’m certain many of you recognized the reference immediately when you first watched the movie, but please remember I’m working backwards here, so I’m quite proud of myself for making the connection. Yes, I know I’m certainly not the first to do it. In fact, while writing this I clicked the IMDb link to DM and sure enough there’s a trivia section explaining it all. Man do I feel dumb now, but since I’ve already put this much effort into the post I might as well make it.

It’s satisfying to see that my labors are already bearing fruit, and I haven’t even finished my first novel. So far I’m really enoying BNW. Perhaps I’ll post a reaction when I finish it.

Also, does anyone have any suggestions for good classic sci-fi? After Dune I’ll probably move to Douglas Adams’ The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or George Orwell’s 1984, but I’m going to need a lot more to keep me going.