Brave New World
One common way to evoke unease about modern science and technology is to say that humanity is headed toward a "brave new world." Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, first published in 1932, depicts a World State in which biological technology and psychological conditioning were used to make everyone feel happy all the time, but this was achieved by creating a mechanized world in which people were reduced to soulless animals. Much of the debate over science and technology has centered on the question of how to avoid such a "brave new world."
Huxley (1894–1963) was a prominent English novelist and essayist. Of his many novels, Brave New World is the one that is best known in the early twenty-first century. It reflects his interest in biological science, which he shared with his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), his brother Julian Huxley (1887–1975), and his friend J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), all of whom were prominent biologists.
The New World State
Brave New World is about an imaginary World State in the future where a combination of genetic manipulation and social conditioning has produced a stable industrialized society governed by the political slogan that "everyone belongs to everyone else." Human eggs are fertilized in laboratories and then incubated under varying conditions for the mass production of people, who are shaped to fill their social caste roles as Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, or Epsilons.
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