![]() It’s no cautionary tale, but an indictment of the principles we live by. Huxley’s dystopia is not about the future. It is a call to the masses and to the human heart to reconcile what we are becoming with all that we should become. As readers, we can’t shake the notion that Huxley’s future gains stability at the cost of what truly gives us life: purpose, love, and belonging.Īt the start of each school year, to reclaim my educational footing (as much for myself as for my students), I take to the chalkboard and define what fiction is: “an imaginative response to a social reality.”īy implication, all serious fiction is prophecy. They exchange happiness for pleasure and quality for quantity. Fordians live by a narrower bandwidth, free from the chasms of life, but also alien to its heights. Instead it’s to change the terms, to constrain and redefine the goal. ![]() For the people of “Our Ford,” the best way to “have it all” is not, actually, to have it all. To us, perhaps, it sounds like the citizens of the World State have it all. The novel is set in an era called After Ford (A.F.) and by 632 A.F., global civilization has solved over-population, geo-political violence, unemployment, class conflict, and social malaise-all within the pillars of Community, Identity, and Stability. Published in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s futuristic, anti-industrial dystopia, Brave New World, offers a blithe picture of a bleak possibility. Book Review: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
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