First Post...I'm gonna make it quick and painless. It's gonna be about a book I just read. A pretty famous one, most of you probably know about. It's called Brave New World and was written by Aldous Huxley in 1932. Since there are hundreds of summaries of this novel I am not trying to do another one. Instead I'll leave you with two quotations I liked and two links to a free audio recording, for which Aldous Huxley himself read "Brave New World".
To give you an idea: The book is about a future society, that is under total control.
People are not naturally born and raised by their mother and father. Birth has been industrialized. People get classified into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, ... and Epsilpons, according to their physical and mental abilities. They get conditioned by several (wicked & weird) processes to fit the life and work they are supposed to do. The important Bokanovsky Process makes it possible to create up to 96 twins out of one egg. Which is great for more industrialization. Imagine 96 twins on 96 production lines doing the exact same work.
"The menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for
the Dying consisted of 162 Deltas divided into two
Bokanovsky groups of eighty-four red-headed females
and seventy-eight dark dolichocephalic male twins,
respectively. At six, when their working day was
over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of
the Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar
with their soma ration."
Holy Ford! Speaking of which. God also has no place in this society. He has been replaced by the great Ford. Yes, the Henry Ford who invented the conveyor belt.
"'ART, SCIENCE - You seem to have paid a fairly high
price for your happiness,' said the Savage, when they
were alone. 'Anything else?'
'Well, religion, of course,' replied the Controller.
'There was something called God before the Nine Years'
War. "
To finish my little picture of the Brave New World, I wanna introduce soma. Soma is a drug, that everybody in this futuristic society takes to feel good (and to repress any kind of emotions..that's how the people got conditioned).
"Hug me till you drug me, honey
Kiss me till I'm in a coma
Hug me honey, snuggly bunny
Love's as good as soma."
In my opinion this book is a must-read for everybody interested in social criticism. But not only then it offers a lot of fun. It's also written in a very nice style, with lots of great pictures, drawn so beautifully with words. (Just imagine a normal person (from our society), finding him/herself in a Bokanovsky group of 96 persons, seeing only 2 faces amongst them (one masculin and one feminine) and hearing only two different voices.) Since I am interested in music, I especially liked how he saw and described future music.
"In the synthetic music machine the soundtrack roll
began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin,
super-'cello and oboe-surrogate that now filled the
air with agreeable languor. Thirty or forty bars -
and then, against this instrumental background, a
much more than human voice began to warble."
I recommend reading it in English. I am not a native speaker and had no problems, and although a dictionary is recommended to get all the beauty of Aldous' language it is not necessary to get the big picture. By the way, did you know that Aldous Huxley grew up in a family of biologists ? Interestingly, his grandfather was known as "Darwin's Bulldog". But you can read all about that at different spots like:
Wikipedia about Aldous Huxley
To finish this post, here are the two links to the forementioned MP3-recording, on which Aldous Huxley read his great novel Brave New World:
Brave New World Recording Part 1
Brave New World Recording Part 2
