In Brave New World people are husks, empty and detached, without ever realising it. I can only admire and praise Huxley’s genius through the writing. Children are fed candy when they are taught about death, they associate the two together, so when as adults they see death they think of treats rather than the loss of someone they have known and worked beside for years. Death is associated with sweetness and relief. The idea of showing any emotion is horrific and repulsive. They are mass produced and designed to be one thing and one thing only. People are machines and houses are factories. And to make things even more maniacally clever, all physical and sexual needs are fulfilled completely as everybody belongs to everybody else in every sense with the ultimate goal of people never developing desire. Nobody should want for anything else.

Very few of them even consider that this is wrong: this is all they have known.

People don’t go missing in the night nor are they stoned to death by a group of their peers, but they have just as little freedom (even if they don’t realise it.) In this dystopia they are trained from birth to think and feel in a certain way, and, for whatever reason, should they ever deviate from their ordained path, they are fed drugs that induce happiness and serenity thus, the populace is kept within their desired space, and persist with the tasks they were born to do. Sex is on tap, everybody should be happy. It’s just as controlling and scary, but it’s done in a more indirect way. And that's the wonder of speculative science fiction, though unlike the other two books, there’s no violence involved in Huxley’s world. It’s a cruel mirroring of our own existence, should we follow a certain path too strongly. Like Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s just enough truth within Brave New World for it to be real. And that’s what makes this novel so powerful it’s not unbelievable. These are words uttered in the face of tyranny and complete oppression, though they are very rare words to be spoken or even thought of in this world because every human passion and sense of creativity is repressed and eradicated through a long and complex process of conditioning. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.

Brave new world book characters