Brave New World revisited

Once upon a time, when I was much younger and far more feistier, I argued with a high school English teacher that 1984 was superior to A Brave New World. I am now older and less feisty but I still have this opinion. In my more humorous moments, I put my elevating 1984 down to my hatred of rats. The English teacher thought (in 1978) that 1984 was a failed prophesy, the closer we came to that year the less influence it would have. Here we are twenty-three, almost twenty-four years after that drear year and Orwell booms louder than Huxley. Huxley's presents a creepy world while Orwell's world is one of horrors that we can see in the daily news.

With all that said, Guardian Unlimited Books has an essay on A Brave New World. Yes, it is worth reading. I would say that I came away with a better appreciastion of Huxley's book. So go read Everybody is happy now' :

"It was Huxley's genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to our uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It's these double-sided imaginative abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World"