- HUXLEY, Aldous
- (1894-1963)UK novelist and man of letters whose fame was freshest in the 1920s, a decade which his work, conveying as it did an overwhelming sense of psychic aftermath, captured precisely; his best fiction, like Point Counter Point (1928), was written then. From 1937 he lived in the USA. Heis today almost certainly remembered most widely for his seminal DYSTOPIA, BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), a book which established such words as "soma"(originally from Sir Thomas MORE's Utopia [1517]) and "feelie" in the English language, and which contributed to social and literary thought a definite model of pharmacological totalitarianism. (Soma is a kind of psychedelic drug used as a social control; the feelies are multisense - or " VIRTUAL REALITY" - movies, developed for the same reason.) BRAVE NEWWORLD depicts a future Earth in which the expression of dissonant emotions and acts is rigorously controlled from above, ostensibly for the betterment of all, though in fact the motives of those in power are, as always, self-serving. Babies, prior to being decanted, are chemically adjusted to grow to assume the body-type and intelligence required at that moment by society, and as a result enter into the appropriate castes, from Alpha to Epsilon (GENETIC ENGINEERING). Sex and all other relationshipsare casual, without dissonance or affect. As in any dystopia, the story both illustrates and exposes this plastic paradise, and presents opportunities for discussion about it. One protagonist goes to a Savage Reservation (where, as a kind of control, a few old-style humans arepermitted their exemplary culture) and there rescues a woman in trouble; he returns with her and her Savage son to the central society. To this she proves unable to adjust: after causing general disgust through her display of visible diseases and her horrifying descent into age, she overdoses despairingly on soma. Her son does little better, though the fracas he causes gains him and two discontented citizens an interview with Mustapha Mond, one of the 10 World Controllers, who argumentatively justifies theprice paid for stability. When the unconvinced Savage attempts to live alone and so to replicate the conditions necessary for the creation of high art, he is soon driven by the mass MEDIA into committing suicide.As argument and as SATIRE, BRAVE NEW WORLD is a compendium of usable points and quotable jibes - the substitution of Ford for God being merely the best known - and has provided material for much subsequent fiction. Its pessimistic accounting of the sterility and human emptiness of utopian communities shaped by a reductive scientism has caused the book to be read as a decisive refutation of those UTOPIAS of H.G. WELLS - e.g., Men Like Gods (1923)-whose strident OPTIMISM about scientific utopianism even Wellshimself could not manage to support with much imaginative conviction. Brave New World Revisited (coll 1958), later assembled with itspredecessor (omni 1960), is a nonfiction series of essays on the themes of the novel from the perspective of 25 years later.After moving to the USA, AH wrote two novels in which utopia/dystopia debates are continued. Apeand Essence (1948), powerfully dystopian, is set in AD2108 after an atomic and bacteriological final WAR. From New Zealand, which has been left untouched, a researcher visits the USA, where he discovers a literally devilish society: human nature and science have gone savagely wrong, and females - now contemptuously known as "vessels" - come into oestrus for only two weeks in the year, after Belial Day. The pessimism of the book is unalleviated, and its presentation, as a kind of ideal filmscript, horrific and disgusted. Island (1962) presents a utopian alternative to the previous books, though without much energy. Pala - the ISLAND in question - is set safely in the Indian Ocean, and has long enjoyed a mildly euphoric existence, sustained spiritually by religious practices derived from Tantric Buddhism, and physically by moksha, a sort of benign soma, whose psychedelic effects smooth the rough edges of the world. But the book itself is powerless to convince.Of AH's other work, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939; vt After Many a Summer 1939 UK), in which aCalifornian oil magnate rediscovers an 18th-century longevity compound and its macabre consequences (APES AND CAVEMEN for other tales that evoke images of DEVOLUTION), and Time Must Have a Stop (1944), one of whose protagonists undergoes posthumous experiences, are both of genre interest. AH was at his most striking in those of his novels, some technically sf,which treated their fictional content as subservient to the matters being discussed and illuminated. The literacy of his style, and the apparent sophistication of his transcendental thought, have perhaps impressed traditional sf readers and critics more than he deserved. There is no denying, however, the extreme importance of the example of his thought in the intellectual development of the genre.JCAbout the author: There are many critical studies. Lilly Zahner's Demon and Saint in the Novels of Aldous Huxley (1975) provides clear analysis and an adequate bibliography.Other studies include Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels (1968) by Peter Bowering, and Aldous Huxley, Satire and Structure (1969) by Jerome Meckier.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
