Brave New World

As I was reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World I couldn’t help but compare his book to George Orwell’s 1984, which was written about seventeen years later. I noticed several similarities in both books therefore I was not surprised when I found out that Orwell had once been Huxley’s student. The two writers wrote their books as a warning to society. They planned on warning the people by writing about horrible and terrifying fictions that could occur in the near future. While George Orwell’s 1984 warns the people about a very harsh government that rules the people by fear, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World demonstrates how the advancement of technology could lead to a controlled society. For my essay, I plan on explaining how some of Orwell and Huxley’s warnings have become reality. But they are not so horrifying now but merely an ordinary part of everyday life. The Brave New World introduced the idea of Bokanovsky's Process, which is explained as the process of creating several babies from one egg, and the idea of developing genetically determined classes of people. As absurd as these ideas might have sounded during Huxley’s time, they are easily accepted now thanks to things like genetic engineering and cloning. 1984 scared the people with Big Brother, who could monitor everything the people did. As alarming as this may have sounded, the federal government has been known to view the books we check out of a library. I also plan on referring to Shakespeare’s The Tempest to show that every one of us has had to be a savage like Caliban in order to be civilized in the future. And although the colonizers ideas were strange to us then they are completely normal for us now. My point is that Orwell and Huxley’s fiction books have become a pleasant reality.