The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

I’ve finished the first book in my From the Stacks reading challenge, so here’s a few thoughts:

I found that even before I’d read all of Brave New World, I was already comparing it to another depressing vision of the future from literature – HG Wells’ The Time Machine.

The Time Machine deals with the subject of evolution, bleakly looking forward to Man’s future as he has devolved into the two sub-species of Eloi and Morlock. If you haven’t read the novel, you must surely be familiar with the 1960 film version. Beautiful but bland people living above the ground, ugly ape-like creatures living below.

Wells really enjoys spelling out the Time Traveller’s grim discovery that he has not found a paradise of the future, and their is something very sinister going on. The master and servant relationship is not as it first seems. Yes, the Morlocks are having the Eloi for dinner. This is the twist in the tale:

These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon – probably saw to the breeding of.

Rather than exploring Man’s degeneration, Brave New World is more interested in what Man can do to himself, especially when he deliberately tinkers with technology, biology, ideology, sociology (go on, name your ology). It struck me that the change in thinking about the consequences of natural evolution to considering enforced changes in behaviour and thinking was caused by historical events. The Time Machine was written in 1898, Brave New World in 1932. What seperated them was the First World War.
During the course of the 20th Century, perhaps the chilling prospect of Man’s own inhumanity to Man altering the course of history began to overshadow the idea of things just taking their own inevitable Darwinian path.

Another comparison I found with other literature is Huxley’s choice of title, which we all know he has borrowed from The Tempest. Where it’s the innocent Miranda who comments on the Brave New World of Prospero’s island in Shakespeare’s play, it’s the savage character that thinks he sees one in Brave New World. The savage is taken away from his familiar world rather than being abandoned there. John (the savage – the Caliban of the story) is removed from his natural habitat by Bernard Marx.

‘O brave new world…’ By some malice of his memory the Savage found himself repeating Miranda’s words. ‘O brave new world that has such people in it.’

In The Time Machine, the books that The Time Traveller find in the future all crumble to dust in his hands. They’ve been left unread and neglected for centuries. Thinking has died out. In Brave New World, the Shakespeare-reciting John discovers that art and poetry have been virtually irradicated. In the eyes of Mustapha Mond, they’re worthless because they are old.

I can’t decide whether Brave New World is a more disturbing vision of the future than The Time Machine. I certainly found its themes more complex, although it had less of a profound effect on my imagination. Ultimately, the grim choice is yours. It’s either join the Eloi and placidly walk to the Morlocks’ dinner table when the bells chime, or join in with the enforced promiscuity and the feelies. Whichever future you choose, it’s guaranteed there’ll be no decent books there.

‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact’, said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy’.
‘All right then’, said the savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy’.

Next up: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K.Dick.

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