The 100 best novels: No 56 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Aldous Huxleys vision of a future human race controlled by global capitalism is every bit as prescient as Orwells more famous dystopia

The grandson of TH Huxley, an eminent Victorian scientist, and scion of a famous family of public intellectuals, Aldous Huxley was a precociously gifted young man who grew up on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. In the 1920s, Huxley acquired a reputation for the kind of heartless, satirical fiction that appealed to the Waste Land generation. Today, he is rather out of favour, and mostly read as a curiosity of his time. Ive put him into this series for the vivacity of his imagination as much as his prose, which is often top-heavy with ideas, and stylistically thin.

Huxleys most famous novel, a dystopian fable set in the seventh century AF (After Ford), began as a parody of HG Wells (No 39 in this series), specifically of Men Like Gods, whose optimism Huxley disdained. A jeu desprit quickly became a vehicle for Huxleys obsession with the consequences of mass industrialisation and the Americanisation of consumer society. But it retained a satirical edge and is also strikingly aphoristic, with a vivid sense of the power of language and ideas in changing human society. Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly, says one character. Theyll go through anything. You read and youre pierced.

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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1wqbPho