English

Brave New World

Author: Aldous Huxley Publication Date: March 1932

2026-04-19 2 min read Sincheenz

A very absurd yet fascinating book. What amazes me is the fact that the author could imagine and write about things that were proven or implemented half a century later.

I looked this up. The book was written in 1931 and published in 1932. Gestation outside the womb was theorized and loosely experimented with in animals in the late 1800s and was actively debated in the 1920s, but the first successful human IVF happened only in 1978—45 years later. The gestation and freezing of embryos, etc.—it’s amazing how he could describe them in such detail.

The Bokanovsky process he described is not exactly cloning, but closer to splitting embryos to create identical individuals; still, real cloning was demonstrated much later with the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996, and the author was clearly tending in this direction.

Genetic selection has evolved over decades. Prenatal screening and amniotic fluid tests began in the mid-20th century, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis became possible in the 1990s. Genetic mapping, and now tools like CRISPR, could allow even more control. It’s scary to think that creating Alpha Plus individuals is now a possibility. Again, he wrote about this 80 years back.

Then there is Soma, a Xanax- and Prozac-equivalent discovered in the 1980s. It’s far-fetched to compare them, but still. And the mention of immersive games—it’s like he anticipated our AR/VR games.

One could say we can always map things from the past to the future, but what intrigues me is how readers would have responded to these ideas 80 years back. Would they have dismissed them lightly and just smiled at them as improbabilities? Are science fiction books motivating scientists to explore these areas, or were these things already existing in some rudimentary form when the writer was writing this book?

I look forward to reading more books in this genre simply to see my own reaction to the ideas described in them. It’s an exciting world we are living in.