Henry Foster, one of Lenina's many lovers, he is a perfectly conventional Alpha male, casually discussing Lenina's body with his coworkers. His success with Lenina, and his casual attitude about it, infuriate the jealous Bernard. Henry ultimately proves himself every bit the ideal World State citizen, finding no courage to defend Lenina from John's assaults despite having maintained an uncommonly longstanding sexual relationship with her. Stamps to feature original artworks celebrating classic science fiction novels". Yorkpress.co.uk. 9 April 2021 . Retrieved 20 September 2022.

Postman, Neil (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. USA: Penguin USA. ISBN 0-670-80454-1. Freemartins, women who have been deliberately made sterile by exposure to male hormones during foetal development but are still physically normal except for "the slightest tendency to grow beards." In the book, government policy requires freemartins to form 70% of the female population. Huxley used the setting and characters in his science fiction novel to express widely felt anxieties, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Huxley was outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity, and the inward-looking nature of many Americans; [24] he had also found the book My Life and Work by Henry Ford on the boat to America, and he saw the book's principles applied in everything he encountered after leaving San Francisco. [23] : viii Plot editFanny Crowne, Lenina Crowne's friend (they have the same last name because only ten thousand last names are in use in a World State comprising two billion people). Fanny voices the conventional values of her caste and society, particularly the importance of promiscuity: she advises Lenina that she should have more than one man in her life because it is unseemly to concentrate on just one. Fanny then warns Lenina away from a new lover whom she considers undeserving, yet she is ultimately supportive of the young woman's attraction to the savage John. According to American Library Association, Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged in the United States due to insensitivity, offensive language, nudity, racism, conflict with a religious viewpoint, and being sexually explicit. [45] It landed on the list of the top ten most challenged books in 2010 (3) and 2011 (7). [45] The book also secured a spot on the association's list of the top one hundred challenged books for 1990-1999 (54), [6] 2000-2009 (36), [7] and 2010-2019 (26). [8] George Orwell's 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contem­porary fact which it had become in 1948, and the fu­ture dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984. In 1965, a Maryland English teacher alleged that he was fired for assigning Brave New World to students. The teacher sued for violation of First Amendment rights but lost both his case and the appeal, with the appeals court ruling that the assignment of the book was not the reason for his firing. [48] Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 254. ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (17 October 2006), P.S. Edition, ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4 — "About the Book." — "Too Far Ahead of Its Time? The Contemporary Response to Brave New World (1932)" p. 8-11 a b Office of Intellectual Freedom (26 March 2013). "100 most frequently challenged books: 1990-1999". American Library Association. Archived from the original on 10 October 2020 . Retrieved 17 June 2021. Sharma, Partap (1975). Razdan, C. K. (ed.). Bare breasts and Bare Bottoms: Anatomy of Film Censorship in India. Bombay: Jaico Publishing House. pp. 21–22. Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 252. ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4. The dehumanizing effects of over-organization are reinforced by the dehumanizing effects of over-popula­tion. Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity's increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health (the highest incidence of schizophrenia, we are told, occurs among the swarming inhabitants of industrial slums); nor does it foster the kind of responsible freedom within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of a genuine democ­racy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total person­alities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, indi­viduals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their ex­istence ceases to have any point or meaning.H. G. Wells' novel The First Men in the Moon (1901) used concepts that Huxley added to his story. Both novels introduce a society consisting of a specialized caste system, new generations are produced in jars and bottles where their designated caste is decided before birth by tempering with the fetus' development, and individuals are drugged down when they are not needed. [54] Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much or­ganization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other.

Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contem­porary theorists of social relations adorn their works! "Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village pro­tected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity." Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors. And along with all that "peace and serenity" there was, throughout the Middle Ages, an enormous amount of chronic frustration, acute unhappiness and a passionate resentment against the rigid, hierarchical system that permitted no vertical movement up the social ladder and, for those who were bound to the land, very little horizontal movement in space. The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such Brave-New-Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and drug-induced euphoria; but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude. Meanwhile impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously acceler­ated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new tech­niques for manipulating, in the interest of some minor­ity, the thoughts and feelings of the masses. The tech­niques of manipulation will be discussed in later chapters. For the moment let us confine our attention to those impersonal forces which are now making the world so extremely unsafe for democracy, so very in­hospitable to individual freedom. What are these forces? And why has the nightmare, which I had pro­jected into the seventh century A.F., made so swift an advance in our direction? The answer to these ques­tions must begin where the life of even the most highly civilized society has its beginnings -- on the level of biology. Their tragic situation is discussed in an important book, published in 1957 -- The Next Hundred Years, by Professors Harrison Brown, James Bonner and John Weir of the California Institute of Technology. How is mankind coping with the problem of rapidly increasing numbers? Not very successfully. "The evidence suggests rather strongly that in most underdeveloped countries the lot of the average individual has wor­sened appreciably in the last half century. People have become more poorly fed. There are fewer available goods per person. And practically every attempt to improve the situation has been nullified by the relent­less pressure of continued population growth." Soma: Huxley took the name for the drug used by the state to control the population after the Vedic ritual drink Soma, inspired by his interest in Indian mysticism. And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ's and physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.Christopher Hitchens, "Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History." Harper's Magazine. November 1998, pp. 37–47. The Arch-Community-Songster, the secular equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the World State society. He takes personal offense when John refuses to attend Bernard's party. Benito Hoover, another of Lenina's lovers. She remembers that he is particularly hairy when he takes his clothes off. From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called "hypnopædia" in the book) to believe their own class is superior, but that the other classes perform needed functions. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and hallucinogenic drug called soma.

After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolution against Utopia than against Victoria. [38]Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. [3] In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", [4] and the novel was listed at number 87 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. [5] In general, Huxley warns his readers that they may be talking themselves into accepting a world that they would reject, if only they were fully conscious of its nature. But, distracted by consumerism and pleasure, people seldom truly engage the reality they are living, just as the citizens of the brave new world seldom recognize the restraints of their society. Unconscious manipulation through language — propaganda — keeps individual minds open to any suggestions, even the most inhuman. Miss Keate, Head Mistress of Eton Upper School. Bernard fancies her, and arranges an assignation with her. [30] Others edit Thomas Robert Malthus, 19th century British economist, believed the people of the Earth would eventually be threatened by their inability to raise enough food to feed the population. In the novel, the eponymous character devises the contraceptive techniques (Malthusian belt) that are practiced by women of the World State.