))
#140 Where Would We Be Without Books?
Manage episode 500681833 series 3683939
About the Book:
Published in 1932, Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision of a future society engineered for efficiency, order, and pleasure—but at the expense of individuality, emotion, and truth. Set in a World State dominated by genetic engineering, social conditioning, and a strict caste system, the novel follows Bernard Marx, a discontented Alpha, and John “the Savage,” who was raised outside the system and becomes its most poignant critic.
As prophetic as it is provocative, Brave New World explores themes of technological control, consumerism, loss of identity, and the cost of utopia. Nearly a century later, its questions still feel eerily relevant. Are comfort and stability worth trading for truth and freedom? And what happens to the human spirit in a world where nothing is left to chance?
About the Author:
Aldous Huxley was an English novelist, essayist, and social critic best known for his incisive and unsettling visions of the future. Born in 1894 into a prominent intellectual family—his grandfather was biologist T.H. Huxley and his brother was biologist Julian Huxley—Aldous studied at Oxford before launching a prolific literary career.
Though Brave New World remains his most famous novel, Huxley wrote widely across genres, from satire (Crome Yellow) to spiritual memoir (The Doors of Perception). His later work grew increasingly concerned with mysticism, consciousness, and the human condition. A lifelong thinker and experimenter, Huxley spent his final decades in the United States, where he remained a vocal critic of conformity, authoritarianism, and unchecked technological progress. He died in 1963, on the same day as C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy.
149 episodes
Share
