Hoo, boy, where to start. Did not think I’d be this disappointed.

I think if I’d read this 5, 10 years ago, I’d have liked it. Today, I do not.

I get why this book is a classic. It’s an idea book like a lot of old sci-fi is, and like a lot of old sci-fi, it suffers in many areas, like characterization. It hasn’t aged well in terms of race and sex.

I think what I can most get behind is what I think is Huxley’s criticism of consumption. In this world, no new activity is added unless it results in the production of something which is consumed. People discard belongings and get new ones regularly. That /has/ aged well, unfortunately.

However, his focus on sexuality and relationships in particular was odd. I wish I knew better what Huxley’s intention was here. It seems like I’m being given a choice between sexual freedom/casual sex and chastity/repression, and I’m supposed to pick chastity. Huxley’s Utopia is definitely problematic in that romantic attachment is looked down on and basically forbidden. But do I care that people have sex with who they want to have sex with? No… the scene where John calls Lenina a whore and pushes her down is very distressing. Ultimately, yes, he doesn’t want sex, so she shouldn’t push it because it’s not consensual. But if I’m supposed to side with John on this, uhh, no, I don’t want that either. Consensual casual sex (or just sex outside of marriage?? I’m not sure what John/Huxley’s standard is) does not inherently equal dehumanization of the people involved.

Is this just because it was published in 1932? Or am I supposed to be upset at John for this? I can’t tell.

One of the other points where I think I disagreed with John/Huxley was related to death. This Utopia treats death /too/ casually. People are just numbers. But what they do is keep children around death and condition children to not be scared of it. In some ways, I think that’s good. The recent book Being Mortal talks about how hard we fight death in the modern age, deny it, try to prolong life to the point that we hurt our quality of life at the end. We deny our families the ability to say goodbye or to achieve bucket list activities because we are in denial about dying in the first place. So in some sense I was like, yes, we should be more accepting of death and less terrified of being around it.

Besides that, we have the very weird racial component. John is like the “noble savage” but is actually a white man raised on the reservation. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than an actual Native American playing this role in the story. But I’m not a fan of it.

Another reviewer noted the good points Mond makes, and I kind of have to agree..