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Brave New World Research Component
Written in 1932, the book is Aldous Huxley’s most famous novel. When it was published however, it was not received as well as it is now. Most reviewers were displeased or disgusted with Huxley’s book, including H. G. Wells. Wells who is often considered the father of science fiction said “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book.” Aldous Huxley’s inspiration to write “Brave New World” came from H. G. Wells book “Men Like Gods,” so Wells took “Brave New World” as a personal betrayal. Men Like Gods is a story of a group of Englishmen that accidentally time travel into a different dimension full of passionless Utopians. The Utopians tell the men of how they put “the primordial fierce combativeness of the ancestral ape-man” behind them and how when civilization was about to end, society was reordered until they achieved “no parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no business competition, no police nor prisons, no lunatics, no defectives nor cripples.” Men Like Gods has a motto, much like “Brave New World”, “Our education is our government.” Huxley thought that this book was absurd and said “Get rid of priests and kings, make Aeschylus and the differential calculus available to all, and the world will become paradise… [Men Like Gods] annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into “Brave New World”.”
Yevgeny Zamyatin, a Russian author wrote “We” which was published in 1924. “We” is a story set in the future about a technocratic One State society in which the citizens are “Numbers” controlled by the absolute authority of the government. Because Yevgeny Zamyatin’s and Aldous Huxley’s books were similar, critics suggested that Huxley was heavily influenced by it or had borrowed from it. George Orwell the author of 1984 wasn’t impressed with “Brave New...