Brave New World

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1932. New York: Bantam, 1958. Frequently reissued.

Presents a world-state of gentle but total control. People in the "Brave New World" are conceived in bottles and, in a sense, never leave their bottle-wombs. The literal womb-bottles move through a literal machine; the figurative womb-bottles, after one is decanted, are themselves within the apparatus of the World State.

Brave New World and Y. Zamiatin's We put into brief dialog with Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower on the motif of walls and in the context of the wall in We as "how humans 'isolate our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals' (91)" — and both earlier works represent "a critique of Fordist capitalism and imperialism," in Hee-jung Serenity Joo, “Old and New Slavery, Old and New Racisms: Strategies of Science Fiction in Octavia Butler’s ‘’Parables’’ Series, ‘’Extrapolation’’ 52.3 (2011): 282.

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Brave New World was adapted for the stage by Dawn King, premiering at Royal and Derngate, Northampton, UK, in 2015, with a strong aim of "adapting the book" in ways that would "encourage audiences to see their own world through Huxley's eyes, including how "technology, in control of powerful elites, can control our decision-making with social media, pornography, the commercialisation of sex, advertising, and reality TV" — etc.[[1]]