If only this grim nightmare was still just fiction
SO FAR, the new Sky TV version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is not as bad as I feared it would be. It is hard to bring this brilliant, bitter book to the screen. So much of Huxley’s fantasy came true long before he predicted it would, so a lot of it is just not shocking any more.
When Huxley wrote it in the 1930s, lifelong marriage was normal and looked as if it would stay that way, children were the expected result of sex, and drug-taking was despised.
His clever idea that a future society would actively encourage promiscuity, abolish parenthood and privacy, and make drug-taking compulsory was too good a prophecy. It’s almost all happened. And, as Huxley feared, we have come to love our own enslavement by pleasure.
I use to think Huxley had been completely right and George Orwell’s alternative nightmare of a surveillance state based on terror, secret police spies and torture had been wrong. But recently I’ve come to the grim conclusion that we will end up with a mixture of both.
On one thing, they both agreed. Hell, whichever sort we end up with, will use the metric system.