History Main / BraveNewWorld

'''''Brave New World''''' can refer to six works:

* ''FanFic/BraveNewWorld'', the ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'' fanfic.

* ''Roleplay/BraveNewWorld'', the JournalRoleplay.
* ''TabletopGame/BraveNewWorld'', a superhero role-playing game.

'''''Brave New World''''' can refer to five works:

* {{Shakespeare}}'s ''Theatre/TheTempest'' – the source of the line, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't," which was quoted by all of the above.

'''''Brave New World''''' can refer to four works:

* {{Shakespeare}}'s ''Literature/TheTempest'' – the source of the line, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't," which was quoted by all of the above.

'''''Brave New World''''' can refer to three works:

* The 2013 {{Civilization}} V expansion.

'''''Brave New World''''' can refer to two works:

This is a disambiguation page.

If you're looking for the novel by Aldous Huxley, it's [[Literature/BraveNewWorld here.]]

If you're looking for the fanfic, it's [[FanFic/BraveNewWorld here.]]

If you're looking for the novel by AldousHuxley, it's [[Literature/BraveNewWorld here.]]

[[redirect:Literature/BraveNewWorld]]

->''"Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"''\\
''"I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."''

A 1932 dystopian novel written by Aldous Huxley. Quite possibly the only serious Western {{Dystopia}} involving ''too much'' happiness... as provided by the totalitarian state.

In the future, most of humanity and the environment people live in has been tailored to make everyone happy. There are five castes of people, ranging from the leader Alpha Pluses down through the barely-human grunt Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons. Everyone is grown in jars and their general roles in society planned before "birth". The population is pacified with virtual reality and the pleasure drug soma. Human needs are satisfied--by biological engineering when necessary; orgies are the norm; and anything that might possibly cause dissatisfaction is simply left out of society.

The cost of continuing to breed people smart enough to keep society running is the risk of emotional instability in those people. Genius creates the risk of madness--yes, in this society, unhappiness qualifies as madness. We have a Type Alpha who is not as tall and strong and beautiful as most, looking more like a Type Gamma; there are continual jokes about his jar getting spiked with alcohol. He fantasizes about being unhappy. And we have a Type Alpha who's in a critical position in society: he writes advertising jingles. Unfortunately, he suddenly wants to create TrueArt, and TrueArtIsAngsty. (No, he doesn't actually create TrueArt. Wanting to is bad enough.)

The only exception to all of this are the "Savage Reservations", barbaric and primal communities where people still live with nature and its cruelties and limitations, where people are born naturally and know the full range of emotions. After growing up on a New Mexico reservation, one of the novel's protagonists leaves for the wider world, where he quickly becomes a celebrity but at the cost of his own sanity as his ideals and emotions clash horribly with that of the rest of society.

This novel is famous for quite a few things. For one, the biological techniques described in the book (such as cloning) would turn out to be remarkably similar to those used in the modern day, despite this novel being written in the 1920s, ''decades'' before real science would ever reach this stage. It helps that Huxley is a member of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_family one of Britain's most important and productive scientific families]] (his older brother Julian was a leading evolutionary biologist and his grandfather Thomas was Darwin's Bulldog, the man who argued Darwin's idea in public for him.).

It's also a true example of CrapsaccharineWorld and CrapsackOnlyByComparison. The Brave New World is a fully-functioning society where everyone is happy, youthful, healthy and productive, but it is presented as a dystopia because this comes at the cost of creativity, free will and progression. The Reservation is a free community of emotion, but it is also a dirty, disease-ridden tribal wasteland where the weak are ostracized and pain equals redemption. Aldous Huxley would later go on to express regret at not including a third option that would have been a happy medium of the two. (He does, in his later book ''Island'', but not for the Savage.)

Huxley has often been accused (including by KurtVonnegut) of plagiarizing ''Literature/{{We}}'' in writing ''BraveNewWorld''. Despite the numerous similarities between the two books, Huxley has always denied this, so compare and contrast the two.

Also, this book is frequently compared to ''[[NineteenEightyFour 1984]]'' as a way of showing the perspectives of the dystopia-esque society. Note that ''[[NineteenEightyFour 1984]]'' shows that [[HighOctaneNightmareFuel what we fear]] [[BigBrotherIsWatching controls us]], while ''BraveNewWorld'' shows that [[FreudWasRight what we love]] [[MemeticMutation controls us.]]

And before you ask, the Music/IronMaiden song of the same name ''was'' [[FilkSong inspired by the book]]. Not to be confused with it, though.

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!!This novel provides examples of:

* AlcoholIsPoison: Lower-caste fetuses are deliberately poisoned with alcohol (and deprived of oxygen) to make them stupid and weak. Notably, this was before alcohol was discovered to have actually been a poison.
* AllIssuesArePoliticalIssues: Bernard does this a lot.
* AmbiguouslyJewish: Bernard Marx.
** Unlikely, given that hardly anyone outside the Savage Reservations has any knowledge of pre-Fordism religion or culture.
* AntiVillain: Despite being one of the ten World Controllers, Mustapha Mond comes off as sympathetic (in both senses - he has sympathy for others, and the reader may tend to like him), because he secretly enjoys many of the old 'smutty' material such as Shakespeare and regrets the sacrifice of things such as truth and freedom. He believes, in his own full capacity, that the sacrifices are worth it.
* AlternativeCalendar: The story starts in 632 AF ("After Ford"), or AD 2540. 1 AF was 1908, the year the Model T came out.
* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy: Having invented the production lines that produce everything (people included), Henry Ford is {{retcon}}ned by society into a literal Christ-like figure. ([[FutureImperfect And combined with]] Sigmund Freud.)
** Played with in that these people were not in and of themselves different or leading some secret life, but were retconned into this by the regime, who needed people to inspire the masses.
* BlitheSpirit: Subverted with John the Savage, who gets pitted against a CrapsaccharineWorld, fails miserably at changing anything, and isn't particularly blithe, either.
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: The new world, according to the Savage (and the reader) -- "Mother" is an obscene word, sex is as quick and impersonal as a handshake, and ''RomeoAndJuliet'' would be considered a comedy.
* BreadAndCircuses
* TheBeautifulPeople: In the upper castes, everyone is genetically engineered to look beautiful, and they show no signs of aging.
* CharacterFilibuster: The last quarter of the book is one big debate between John Savage and Mustapha Mond on TheEvilsOfFreeWill.
* ConditionedToAcceptHorror: Most people have no idea just how vapid and insignificant their lives are. The ones who ''do'' know this are so difficult to integrate that they're just shipped off to isolated islands just so they don't have to think about it so much.
* CrapsaccharineWorld: Your options are a {{dystopia}} that destroys creativity and free will ''by overfilling you with pleasure'' or an exile in a squalid, low-technology reservation. An attempt to make a society where everyone is treated equally collapsed into civil war within a few years. (Everyone on that island was an Alpha, even though jobs done by other castes in the rest of society still needed to be done; predictably, all the islanders considered themselves above such tasks, they didn't get done, and things snowballed.)
** CrapsackOnlyByComparison: John the Savage views the "utopian" world of London as amoral, unnatural, and pointless, while Lenina sees John's home on the savage reservation as backwards, uncivilized, and barbaric.
* DecoyProtagonist: Bernard Marx. Literature teachers often use him to introduce the concept to students.
* {{Deconstruction}}: Of the {{Utopia}} genre, and particularly Plato's ''The Republic''. More specifically, the ThemeParkVersion of Utopia, "where everyone's happy".
* DesignerBabies: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. In short, pretty much 95% of society with the lower orders even being an inversion.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: By PaintingTheFourthWall, no less.
* DisproportionateRetribution: Bernard ruins the DHC's career because he wanted to transfer him.
* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Too many to count.
* DomedHometown
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:John is at the end when he is unable to escape or resist society.]]
* EarnYourHappyEnding: Subverted: [[spoiler:John tried and fails and ultimately kills himself because of it]].
* {{The Evils of Free Will}}: Mustapha tells about an experiment with an all-Alpha population. It soon devolved into a civil war and resulted in the citizens requesting that the government take back control.
* ForHappiness: In a [[{{Deconstruction}} deconstructed]] way.
* FreeLoveFuture: Everyone is encouraged [[{{Squick}} from earliest childhood]] to have sex with as many people as possible, and never to form strong attachments to any of them. Chastity is the deadliest of virtues. John confuses Lenina by ''not'' jumping her bones at the first opportunity; because of this, she ends up ''longing'' for him, and comes the closest she will ever come to actually feeling love in her whole pathetic, sex-saturated life.
* FreudWasRight: In-universe, as FreudWasRight is practically a religious tenet.
* FutureImperfect: [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] by the government. No history is taught and texts from before a certain date are strictly forbidden; the few references to the past that come up would appear to our minds to have gone through centuries of misinterpretation. For example, Henry Ford has been conflated with Sigmund Freud, but only in psychological contexts.
* FutureMusic
* FutureSlang:
** "Ford" has basically replaced "God" and "Lord" in ''all'' contexts, resulting in titles like "his fordship" and exclamations like "For the love of Ford!"
** "Pneumatic." (actually 1920s slang, but almost forgotten today so it seems like future slang)
* GeniusBreedingAct: Embryos are created in labs, and people are born into different classes: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon. These groups are engineered to have different intelligence levels both through genetic selection and differences in their artificial fetal environment; for example, an Alpha is made from Alpha gametes ''and'' incubated in an optimal fetal environment.
* GettingSmiliesPaintedOnYourSoul: One of the major themes of the book is whether keeping everyone passive and happy is worth eliminating any deeper emotions which could cause conflict.
* GovernmentDrugEnforcement: Soma and Malthusian Belts.
* HappinessInSlavery: Pretty much all of society is conditioned to like exactly where they are. Those at the top enjoy their intelligence, those at the bottom enjoy not having complicated responsibilities, and those in the middle think they have just enough intelligence without having too many responsibilities.
* HappinessIsMandatory
* HeterosexualLifePartners: Bernard and Helmholtz.
** Bernard seems to see John and Helmholtz as this later on.
* HonorBeforeReason: John, so very much.
* IgnoreTheFanservice: John in regards to Lenina.
* IHaveManyNames: Ford is stated to go by "Freud" in psychological contexts, as if the name were a godly epithet.
* InherentInTheSystem: The brainwashed existence and/or the menial labor.
* IJustWantToBeNormal: Bernard Marx and Linda.
* IronicEcho[=/=]TitleDrop: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in it."
* LargeAndInCharge: The lower classes are shorter than the Alphas and Betas.
** Justified in that stunted growth is a symptom of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but at the time the book was written, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was not known to exist. Huxley ''[[AccidentalTruth made up a condition]] [[VindicatedByHistory that later turned out to be real]]'', and ''[[CrowningMomentOfAwesome even managed to get the symptoms right]]''.
* LiteraryAllusionTitle: The title is taken from ''TheTempest''.
* LiveActionAdaptation: The little known miniseries.
* MachineWorship[=/=]AllHailTheGreatGodMickey: The future society worships Henry Ford. They even set the calendar by him.
* MeaningfulName: Most characters have names that refer to famous political and cultural figures, like Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne, Benito Hoover, Darwin Bonaparte and so on.
** Also, [[{{Irony}} "Linda" means beautiful.]]
* MemeticMutation: ''Invoked''. [[BeyondTheImpossible As a form of mind control]].
** With that in mind, the combined lesson here is [[WarpedAesop emotion is the cause of all our problems.]] But nobody can create a society where emotions are absent...[[TheGiver right?]] [[{{Equilibrium}} RIGHT?]]
* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: John after [[spoiler:participating in a soma-fueled orgy; he retreats to a secluded cottage to flagellate himself, and eventually [[DrivenToSuicide hangs himself]].]]
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: John's life is utterly ruined by Bernard bringing him to the "civilized world".
* NobleSavage
* OlderThanTheyLook: Everyone stays young (physically, mentally, etc.) until their deaths.
* OneWorldOrder
* OverlyLongTitle: An in-universe jazz standard, "There ain't no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine".
* PurpleEyes: People who work with the embryo-jars, which are kept in dim, red-lit rooms, are genetically chosen to have eyes which can see better in red light, which gives the eyes a purple tinge.
* RaisedByNatives
* ReallyGetsAround: Almost everyone (since this is the norm), although [[MsFanservice Lenina]] deserves a special mention
* ReleasedToElsewhere: People who are too smart or innovative are sent to islands. However, Mustapha Mond's comment of "Why, if we didn't have all these islands, we'd probably have to send them to gas chambers!" may make you a little suspicious about the exact nature of these "islands." Especially when Mond mentions the Cyprus experiment, specifically how Cyprus was "[[InferredHolocaust cleared of all its existing inhabitants]]". Cyprus was an island.
** Alternatively, the inhabitants of Cyprus really were sent else; Bernard regards being sent to an island as a terrible punishment, but Helmholtz is quite positive about it.
* RoboticAssemblyLines: Opens with a description of the cloning assembly line.
* RomanticismVersusEnlightenment: The Savage versus the "progressive" World State.
* SarcasticTitle
* ScienceMarchesOn: Huxley was ahead of his time in saying that fetal exposure to alcohol is a Bad Thing, but his assumption that it's possible to create a specific level of disability with a specific amount of alcohol is not true. In real life, the results are immensely more variable than Huxley suggests, and much of the difference has to be random chance: it's common for one member of a pair of identical twins born to an alcoholic to be severely disabled and the other to be completely normal. His assumption that women need to go through fake pregnancy if they don't really get pregnant, and that darker-complexioned women need to go through it at an earlier age because they're "born to have babies young", is an unfortunate remnant of early 20th century racial theory that portrayed darker people as more primitive.
* SendInTheClones: Humanity is mass produced in batches of "identical twins" on the order of hundreds at a time.
* {{Sexophone}}: The briefly mentioned sexophones are either renamed saxophones or some odd new instrument. Sex is so blasé in this civilization that a deliberate rename wouldn't be out of the question.
* ShallowLoveInterest: Lenina, intentionally.
* ShownTheirWork: At the time, the idea that alcohol could cause developmental disabilities was almost unknown, and Huxley's ideas about in vitro fertilization and cloning were similarly cutting-edge
* ShoutOutToShakespeare: The title comes from ''TheTempest'', and since one of John's first books was an anthology from the Bard, he's prone to quoting him.
-->'''Miranda:''' O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in it!
* StepfordSmiler: Tons.
* TakeAThirdOption: Bernard and Helmholtz chose this when presented with the "Stability or Freedom" question. The concept itself is not explored in depth until Huxley's later work, ''Island''. Mustapha Mond tells them that he was also faced with this choice, but took a third offer to become a Controller. He regards this as the harder path than going to an island, but more worthwhile.
** A foreword written by Huxley suggests that, given the chance, he might have given John a third option in the end.
* TalkingTheMonsterToDeath: The book's climax consists of a dialogue between John the Savage and Mustapha Mond. However, [[DownerEnding Mond wins]], and decides to send the heroes to a safe haven or paradise of their choice.
* ThemeNaming: All the characters except John the Savage are named after renowned industrialists, capitalists, communists, psychologists, or philosophers.
** John's behaviour indicates he's probably named after the concept of the Noble Savage.
* TotalitarianUtilitarian: The story takes place in a society where ForHappiness have become such a great cultural obsession that it has become oppressive.
* TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior: ''We're'' [[{{Squick}} troubled]]. The adults in-story aren't.
* UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans: Mustapha Mond's defense of the new world and its ruthless suppression of intellect, creativity and freedom. He genuinely believes the happiness and comfort the world's gained is more than worth it, and makes a scarily strong argument against TheEvilsOfFreeWill.
* TheWarToEndAllWars: The Nine Years War, which happened roughly 500 years before the start of the novel.
* WeWillHavePerfectHealthInTheFuture
* WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture - The lower (read: intentionally retarded) castes. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]]; they've got the technology to make a great deal of that work obsolete and in fact tried just that, only to find out that it made people unhappier. It's better to give the Epsilons [[TVTropesWillRuinYourLife somewhere to go and something to do for 8 hours]], so labor-saving technology was intentionally dialed back to create more make-work. As for why they didn't just stop breeding/manufacturing the lower castes and let a society of free, intelligent humans operate the labor-saving devices themselves: they tried that too, and the island they tried it on [[TooManyCooksSpoilTheSoup collapsed into civil war within a couple of years]].
* {{Zeerust}}

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<<|{{Literature}}|>>

* FreudWasRight

* {{Sexophone}}: The briefly mentioned sexophones are either renamed saxophones or some odd new instrument. Sex is so blase in this civilization that a deliberate rename wouldn't be out of the question.