Brave New World

Author: Aldous Huxley

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  • : 14.99 AUD
  • : 9780099518471
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
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  • : 0.205
  • : November 2007
  • : 200mm X 133mm X 18mm
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  • : 14.99
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  • : books

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  • : Aldous Huxley
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  • : Paperback
  • : 1
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  • : English
  • : 823/.9/12
  • : very good
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  • : 288
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Barcode 9780099518471
9780099518471

Description

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. - "After Ford" - in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and operant conditioning that combine to profoundly change society.

Promotion info

'One of the most important books to have been published since the war' Daily Telegraph 20031017

Reviews

Brave New World is often sidelined when talking about dystopian novels, in favour of 1984 but is as good, if not better. Huxley wrote the novel in 1931 but managed to predict developments that make the novel eerily prescient and quite scary. Widely considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, if you are weighing up whether or not to read it, the answer is a resounding Yes - Elisa, Book Grocer "It is impossible to read Brave New World without being impressed by Huxley's eerie glimpses into the present" New Statesman "The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy" -- Margaret Atwood Guardian "Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th century novelist ... Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere" -- JG Ballard "A brilliant tour de force, Brave New World may be read as a grave warning of the pitfalls that await uncontrolled scientific advance. Full of barbed wit and malice-spiked frankness. Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling" Observer "What Aldous Huxley presented as fiction with the human hatcheries of Brave New World has become fact. The consequences are profound and, if we don't get it right, deeply disturbing" -- John Humphrys Sunday Times

Author description

Aldous Huxley was born on 26th July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop, 1944 and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, Grey Eminence, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954. Huxley died in California on 22nd November 1963.