To be totally honest, it’s hard for me to say that I really enjoyed this book. As a reader, a lot of things about this book were just really odd to me, and I don’t really see the appeal to the book, at least for myself. I didn’t really understand how the society that everyone lived in was a ‘utopia’, due to a number of large factors. The first one would be that no one has any family members. To me especially, it seems crazy that a society where no one has any family would be considered a ‘utopia’ by any stretch, mainly because a lot of my world revolves around my family. I do know that this depends for a lot of people, as everyone has different relationships with those people. However, for me, most of what I do is with my family. If I’m going skiing, it’s with my family. If I’m going on a vacation, it’s with my family. If I’m going on a road trip, it’s going to be with my family. You get the point. A lot of what I do is with my family, and I like it that way. If I had no family like in the society of BNW, I’d be left not really knowing what to do next.
The second factor would be the amount of sexual elements in their society. While I understand that since no one has any family members and that sex is only for recreation, the whole concept is disgusting. Little children who are just starting to put a picture together of the world playing sexual games with each other is literal insanity at best, but this being part of a utopia is just on another level for me. Flipping through the pages of this book I would be thinking to myself: “Could this be any worse?” I’d then flip to the next page and I would go “Actually yes, somehow they made this even worse!” The final factor would be the genetic modification of humans in this society. I wasn’t really a fan of the fact that people were artificially bred into specific classes of society. The fact that people are predetermined to be in a certain class before they even get started just doesn’t sit right with me. What happened to working your way up to becoming a manager of a massive corporation through hard work ethics and determination? While Epsilons might be just content being janitors and street cleaners, it seems wrong to predetermine a newborn to be one for the rest of their life. Despite the fact that I wasn’t really a fan of the book, I did find the societies’ usage of hypnopedia interesting. It would be cool to see some sort of technology arise using this practice. Overall, Brave New World wasn’t my favourite book in the world, and I personally didn’t enjoy it that much.