"Brave New World," By Aldous Huxley; 7/10

 [Read By Michael York]

OMG YOU ONLY GIVE IT 7/10?!1 WTF?!

Going back through my reading it is interesting how things group together, either through memory or through removed observation after a long period.  There was the group of books which were made into films by Stanley Kubrick, then there were books I remember reading at the beach that summer, and now I will bash two bedrock works of my beloved genre, Science Fiction.  Total classics, writers of the first rank, bashed by me.

The good thing is that when I castigate this book, I think I have a damned good reason. 

It is my opinion that if you set a work of fiction in a world other than the real one, say, in a dystopian future like that of "Brave New World," that you have set yourself two tasks.  You must create a convincing setting, one which ideally would challenge the reader with its implications, produce questions and provoke thoughts, and so forth, on its own merits.  Secondly, as any writer must, you have to populate that world with interesting characters who do interesting things which cause you to think interesting thoughts.

In writing "Brave New World" Aldous Huxley succeeded brilliantly at the first of these tasks, many would argue better and more imaginatively than any other writer has ever done.  It was probably the first great Dystopian work, and set the standards and defined many important tropes which still wield enormous influence on writers in the genre and out of it almost a century later.  The society Huxley creates is brilliant, and the introduction to it, which comprises roughly the first quarter of the novel, is extraordinary.  Decanted birth, the conditioning to produce Alphas, Deltas, etc, birth control, promiscuity, and of course, soma, are just stellar works of creative genius, that in some ways may never be topped.  The speech that the World Controller Mustapha Mond gives at the end of the book is one of the great passages, to my mind, that I have ever read, with his historical critique of 20th century society and contrast of it with the "Brave New World." These things make this novel unforgettable.

Sadly that is a word that I could not use to describe Huxley's attempt at the second of the conditions which I set out for a successful novel of this kind.  The characters are, in my opinion, completely vapid and un-interesting.  They are constantly either presenting 20th century values in ways that make no sense at all as a foil for the future, or behaving utterly irrationally or without motivation.  The number of times the protagonist does something ridiculous, wild, or completely out of any character which he might have been thought to have overcame my attempts to count them.  The other characters, such as they were, never said or did anything remotely interesting to me.  In general I thought the plot managed to somehow be both boring and overblown, and the characters/dialogue were never anything but trite and unrealistic. 

I am really glad I read this book, if for no other reason than to know what the fuss was all about, and to catch the references to it.  It was read superbly by Michael York, an excellent British film and stage actor with one of the best voices in the business and already endeared to Sci-Fi fans for his starring role in the classic film "Logan's Run."

Comparisons to 1984, however, are in my opinion so completely undeserved that I barely even think I can take them up here.  As arresting as the world Orwell creates is, in the end the thing I cared about most was the dialogue between O'Brien and Winston Smith, and the latter's internal monologue.  With the exception of the passage at the end which I referred to, I was never even close to caring about anyone in "Brave New World" or anything they said or did.  Could you love a book without investment in plot or characters? I personally say, "No."

One thing this novel did produce, I add as a footnote, is a splendid song.  "Soma" by the Strokes. Love it.