Book Discussion: Brave New World 2
The early 1930s were a bad time for people who loved freedom. The Communists had taken over in Russia, as had the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis were fast gaining power in Germany. The world economy had just crashed. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his novel of what the totalitarian future might be like.
It hasn’t held its popularity as well as Orwell’s 1984, but it may be a better prediction of the future. In Huxley’s dystopia, there are no secret police or torture chambers. The police use tranquilizers rather than lethal bullets. People are punished by reassignment rather than death or prison. It works because everyone is brainwashed from birth and controlled by drugs. Organized rebellions don’t happen. The models for 1984 were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Brave New World is closer to modern China.
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A movie was made of it in 1984. Ende didn’t like it. It has some scenes that live up to the book, which is saying a lot. As a whole, though, it fails. It stops about halfway through the novel and tacks on a nonsensical ending. The most gripping or frightening scenes from the book are omitted or toned down.
Piranesi without saying too much. As in an adventure game, the world-building comes to the foreground. The narrator lives in a huge house which is his entire world. It has hundreds of halls and thousands of statues. The staircases seem scaled for giants. The House is so large that it has tides, seasonal snowfall, and a wildlife ecosystem. Yet as far as the narrator knows, it has only two inhabitants. The narrator is as much of a mystery as the house is, even to himself.