Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
1932, 2008, Amazon Kindle
0582060168
256p.

A dystopian view of the future where people are genetically engineered and socially conditioned from before birth to fit in to the role which society has ordained for them. Everyone is happy and there is no violence. There's also no art, no truth and no freedom as we define it.

I read this expecting it to be a true dystopia, however, the concerning thing I found was that the society depicted in the novel is very much like the society I find myself in. People are encouraged to not think, to be promiscuous, childhood sexual behaviour is encouraged, entertainment does not tell of truth and beauty but simply tells a story for the sake of itself. Extroverts are thought of as normal and introverts as perverted and weird. If you are feeling unhappy, you must take drugs to fix it, to make the feeling go away. Consumerism is the basis of society (Henry T Ford is God); if something is broken, we replace, we do not mend (the more stitches, the less riches).

So all in all, I found this to be one of the most disturbing dytopias I have ever read.