The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds - the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative. Ours was a nightmare of too little order theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much.

were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching - these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley

Aldous huxley brave new world online