Critical viewpoints on Brave New World

Question 1

Nikolai Berdiaev, epigraph to Brave New World

Answer 1

“perhaps a new period is beginning, a period when intelligent men will be wondering how they can avoid these utopias, and return to a society non-utopian, less perfect, but more free.”

Question 2

Jospeh Needham, ‘Biology and Mr. Huxley’ 1932

Answer 2

“For of course in the world at large […] who do not approve of his ‘utopia,’ will say, we can’t believe all this, the biology is all wrong, it couldn’t happen. Unfortunately, what gives the biologist a sardonic smile as he reads it, is the fact that the biology is perfectly right”

Question 3

Caitrin Nichol, Brave New World at 75

Answer 3

"”Vivaparous” reproduction, that shameful secret of the past, has been replaced with manufacture”

Question 4

David Punter, ‘Writing and the Future’, 2015

Answer 4

“Brave New World […] is essentially a book about cloning and about the loss of individuality.”

Question 5

David Punter, ‘Writing and the Future’, 2015

Answer 5

“the principal fear behind it is the fear of ‘becoming a machine’.”

Question 6

David Punter, ‘Writing and the Future’, 2015

Answer 6

“Brave New World is essentially a political book: although it deals in science and standardisation and many of the matters we would now refer to under the heading of ‘genetic engineering’, itnis essentially a book about the power of the State”