Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Part 1

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 155

  June 4, 2017 

Book 47 - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley (1932)
 Part 1 - vii-xxi; 1-36
Reading Time - 1 hour

Another book on my 2017 Reading Challenge list. I'm pretty sure that I had to read this book in high school but... honestly, I don't really remember much of it... or anything of it.

There is a fairly long introduction by Christopher Hitchens and then a Preface by Huxley himself, written a few decades after the original publication of the book.

The first couple of chapters take us on a tour of a Fertilization and Incubation centre... from the introduction of sperm to egg, all the way through to birth of an infant from a bottle. There are 5 castes of humans - Alpha, Betta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon. And while the fetuses are in-vitro (in bottles), they are tweaked so that when they are decanted (born), they may be stunted Epsilons or high-caste Alphas... and everything in between. We learn that the lower cast embryo cells are forced to subdivide into more and more buds so that 16000+ infants can come from one fertilized egg. Essentially, you end up with 16000+ identical humans - ideal for staffing a factory or something. We learn that the infants are brainwashed in their sleep. We learn that sex is open and free and that young children are encouraged and expected to engage in sexual activity. It's a weird world... that's for sure! In these first few chapters, we meet what appear to be some of the main characters in the book.