Satirical Future

Starting in my Grade 9 year I began to ask a question which seemed simple to me... rather than trying to find the 'meaning of life' I decided to go further. I made the assumption that we already knew the meaning, but no one would tell me for some reason of perhaps a conspiracy, I didn't bother to find out why not. The question was instead "to what end is society moving." The answer, or rather impossibility to give a correct answer, would change my life.

In Grade 9 my Social Studies teacher handed me a copy of Orwell's 1984 after class one day and only said the words "You can try to read this, but it's at least a Grade 12 level book."

Not realizing that 1984 was satirical made it tougher to read, but I managed to get through it on a Road trip to visit my Grand Parents. Twenty hours of sitting in the back of a minivan is a great way to never be interrupted.

I re-visited 1984 again the next year and started to really understand it. It was at this time that I realized it was satirical. For some reason, I stopped reading after this. I took 1984 as the answer, and didn't expect that anyone else could have written a book as well.

Then I heard of Huxley. Through a drug counsellor in Grade 12 (don't ask) I heard of 'The Doors of Perception' (Huxley.) Once I read this book, or rather essay, I realized I had found another author as good or better than Orwell. The next challange in life I had was to continue reading his writing, and I put a lot of energy into it at thtat time of my life.

The book I picked up next was Huxley's Brave New World. My first thought's: 'Wow, this is going to take years to read, its over 300 pages!' To my amazement the book was finished within a week.

I couldn't put the book down at night and instead of reading to go to sleep (falling asleep was a problem for me) I ended up staying awake all night just to read this book for a week. Once you start you are sucked right into things, there isn't a long drab introduction.

First Look
The cover could use work, but it really depends which one you see. There are at least ten different covers for this book.

Characters
The characters introduced were very clear and concise, when new characters came I felt like I could shake hands with them and pinpoint on the timeline when we met.

The Plot
The plot of the book maintains a few holes but perhaps this is more exagerated in today's world than in the 1950s/60s when the book was read. Watch the old Star Trek shows - those were as technically feasable in their prime day as today's revisions of the show are today.

Timeline
The timeline of the book extends over about a year, during which our main character slowly erodes his programmed bindings to society and ends up visiting a 'savage reservation.' It is here that he becomes attached to a child, the son of his Director back in the new society. This word has more meaning in the book - "son" - children in the Brave New World are not born to a mother and father (which have become words marked as profanity.) Things get really interesting when he returns to see the director, and brings along the lost son of the director and the child's Mother...

Details
The details of this book are extremely vidid and clear. It makes the difference for me between an interesting novel and my coffee cup coaster.

Ideas Expressed
Enough about the characters, timeline, and plot... You can read thousands of short interpretations of the book if you want that. I really want to write about the ideas presented, the interesting part of the book.

The Soma
Soma is the main drug used in this book. It is a perfectly engineered drug, it makes a person happy on a short-tern without any side-effects and is in extremely easy supply. The drugs we have available today are not so well-engineered, even though we have the pharmacists to define what it needs to be and the chemists smart enough to make such a drug. People in today's society have been programmed that 'all drugs are bad' (except those sold under capitalism... hmm) and paradise engineering will take a lot of work if we wish for people to begin taking drugs when they feel down.

Hypnopaedia
Hypnotizing what? Hypnopaedia - teaching in your sleep. The children are taught 24/7, even when asleep through a speaker under their pillows. They are taught short strings of text that are easy to remember and prompted by keywords. It is not possible to teach long sentances and expect a child to understand them, they can regurgatate them, but not understand. When teaching a short sentance with a small rhym and rythm to it, the child repeats it enough to really understand it. For example, "a gram is better than a damn" is one sentance played over and over again to the children at night. The referance of "a gram" is to the national drug soma.

Birth Control
Rather than trying to completly control the normal instincts of human beings, they equip all females with birth control methods which they must have on them at all times. Sex is not something done with one partner, and is actually viewed upon just as the opposite of today - being with more than one partner today is an extremely bad thing, however Huxley writes that it may be a complete transofmration in the future where you can be punished for not "having" more than one person.

Teaching the Young
Rather than allowing a young person to choose his or her own path the paths are pre-programmed. Starting as early as the "bottling process" the embryo's are taught what to like and what not to like. Certain bottles are deprived of oxygen to create a moron class, other bottles are subjected to extreme heat to create a iron-factory class (where the workers will enjoy the heat and nothing else.) Electric shock, heat, alcohol exposure, extreme cold, and other methods which today we would consider as torture are used to help train the youths.

Final Words
As Huxley wrote this book he was purposly giving his "ideal" society features very likely to alienate his audience. This book was not written to show us how happy we can be if we are to rewrite the human genome, but is a satirical piece of work.