Brave New World facts for kids
First edition
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| Author | Aldous Huxley |
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| Cover artist | Leslie Holland |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Science fiction, dystopian fiction |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
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Publication date
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1932 |
| Pages | 311 (1932 ed.) 63,766 words |
| Awards | Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century |
| OCLC | 20156268 |
Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley. It was first published in 1932. The novel is set in London of "AF 632", which is about 2540 AD. The novel anticipates huge scientific advancements that will change society. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Contents
History
Huxley wrote Brave New World while living in Sanary-sur-Mer, France, in the four months from May to August 1931. By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, and had published a collection of his poetry (The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four successful satirical novels: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928).
Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first dystopian work.
Huxley said that Brave New World was inspired by the utopian novels of H. G. Wells, including A Modern Utopia (1905). Unlike the most popular optimistic utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia."
Huxley used the setting and characters in his science fiction novel to express widely felt anxieties, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future.
Legacy
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 87 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
On 5 November 2019, BBC News listed Brave New World on its list of the 100 most influential novels. In 2021, Brave New World was one of six classic science fiction novels by British authors selected by Royal Mail to feature on a series of UK postage stamps.
Related pages
Images for kids
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First UK edition
See also
In Spanish: Un mundo feliz para niños
