ABSTRACT

It is the winter of 2002—my last semester teaching high school. I am in the middle of teaching my senior literature class the science fiction satire Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Originally published in 1932, the novel is a dystopian portrait of the future, in which a powerful global government controls every aspect of its citizens’ lives, not through brutal oppression, but through biological, psychological, and socioeconomic conditioning. To maintain social stability, the global government—the World State—engineers its citizens in laboratories, alters their intelligence and abilities to fit a stratified class hierarchy, and keeps them in blissful ignorance by encouraging sexual promiscuity and by pushing a recreational drug called soma. Part satire of modern existence, part caveat about the future, Brave New World has been popular in secondary literature curricula since its publication—though it has often been challenged for its sexual content and drug references.