recommended reading

So! Now that Facebook is out of the way, I've gotten started with a new book (even though I've only just begun Part Two of Anna Karenina). It's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Before it became a trite media catchphrase, "brave new world" had a different meaning: a "soulless, streamlined Eden," as this dust cover puts it, one that Huxley both loved and hated, but one he felt was the best possible future for humanity.

I'll tell you this before I say anything else: this is the first book that has ever, ever made me reach for a highlighter. And that happened when I was reading the forewords, introductions and preambles. I've only just started on the actual book itself.

Why? Huxley's message (as demonstrated by the writer of the foreword/introduction, David Bradshaw) is downright pithy. Huxley, for all his obsession with eugenics (and hallucinogenics), still had his head in the right place about politics. He looked at the deadlock that was British Parliament at the time, and he saw the two-party squabbles, mass consumption, material excess and assorted vulgarity going on in the mechanized, polarized, pasteurized United States, and he despaired. This is where it gets kooky, though. He figured totalitarianism was a good idea. Rather like Anakin Skywalker, he felt it was time to give up on parliamentary democracy and subordinate humans to the will of "men who will compel us to do and suffer what rational foresight demands." To cut the red tape, Huxley argued, human beings should give in to abject control, maintained by omnipresent propaganda, recreational drugs, casual sex—the bread and circuses which the empowered use to keep the disenfranchised happy. This end result was desirable, Huxley stated, even when the result was merely a caricature of freedom, a grotesque parody of Utopia—the like of which he wrote about in Brave New World.

(Interestingly, Huxley believed that California was the closest thing to a material Utopia he'd ever seen, which is probably why he and I both consider the place to be so messed up.)

The ambivalence with which Huxley viewed this hateful but efficient Utopia is only too obvious in Brave New World, even in the first few pages that I've read. On the one hand, it sounds like the cynical (or pragmatic) part of Huxley is saying what he actually believes, while the humanist in him can hardly believe what he's hearing. Something's better than nothing, that's the crux of the matter. "Ending," as the slogan goes, "is better than mending."

I can't wait to read the rest of this book. Bradshaw's foreword (and Huxley's own introduction) had me highlighting passages that are of enormous import for my own science fiction writings, particularly my magnum opus:

"It may be that circumstances will compel the humanist to resort to scientific propaganda, just as they may compel the liberal to resort to dictatorship. Any form of order is better than chaos."

Man, that sounds just like the liberals and Democrats in power in America today. They'll impose any kind of restrictive law, regulation or tax on the citizenry if it means getting one step closer to their idea of a utopia.

"The thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards."

Huxley wrote that in 1926. It still holds true today, given the damage the progressives and liberals have done (and are still doing) to the U.S. Constitution, the economy, personal liberties and the American dream.

Then there's the less politically-charged stuff, quotes that reaffirmed my belief in the aims, messages, and symbolism in my works. Huxley once explained that his aim as a novelist was "to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay." Yes, yes, yes. That's precisely what I'm trying to do. My writings aren't allegorical, but they do contain an underlying point about society. H.G. Wells and Huxley, among others, were well able to churn out so-called "novels of ideas" with aplomb and insight. I hope to do the same.

Bradshaw's foreword also states that, in his 1937 book Ends and Means, Huxley tried "to relate the problems of domestic and international politics, of war and economics, of education, religion and ethics, to a theory of the ultimate nature of reality." Hallucinogens aside, this is another goal of mine: to unite the fundamentals of human existence, the serried pillars of anthropic thought and all the minute tendrils of our industry and endeavor (flaws included) into a single, simple truth.

And yes, before you ask, I do believe that there is one—a simple human truth. It guides my every thought, deed, and written word.

So needless to say, I'm hooked on Brave New World. What I'll read may be monstrous, perverted, outlandish and uncanny, but it's bound to be interesting (and well-written). Though the world Huxley delineates is the antithesis of the one I'm busy crafting (an independent, self-sufficient, free-minded, libertarian, honest, forthright, upstanding sort of world with a good work ethic and a strong sense of right and wrong), I can only learn from reading others' viewpoints. Wish me luck.

Oh, and I finished Part One of Anna Karenina. Which means that I'm, oh, about 11% done with the book. Thanks, Tolstoy, you wordy little bugger.