Introduction by Margaret Atwood:
'in the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. one was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace and the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
the other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.'
- pVII, Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
'in the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. one was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace and the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
the other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.'
- pVII, Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
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