This page contains the selected literature that are to be reviewed this week by our staff.

Brave New World Revisited

by Richard Kwong

There has been a recent increase in the popularity of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The explosion in sales of the novel and discussions of the novel seem to be caused by the coming of the 22^nd century.

Huxley’s foreboding story, written in the early half of the last century, takes place in a society where drugs and sex are the moral code. It is a place where intellectual excitement, creativity, and individualism have been abolished through conditioning while they sleep. A place where the citizens are laboratory-grown clones that are taught that they do not have parents and the words "mother" and "father" are curses.

These people are ruled by a totalitarian state that decides their social class, their personality, and their hair color while they are still being "grown" in their glass jars. The different social classes live peacefully, but only because they have been conditioned not to envy or to conflict with each other.

In the world of Brave New World, all is sacrificed to ensure happiness, and lasting stability and peace. The recently increased popularity of the novel does not come at a more opportune time. The lessons learned from this story will provide our society with the decisions that should not be made. In this writer’s opinion, Brave New World is the best thing that has happened to this world since the incorporation of the television, computer, and radio.

                                    Looking Backward Revisited

                                                                       By   Christina Won

    Utopian America is the backdrop for Edward Bellamy’s prophetic novel about a young Boston gentleman who is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It is a blueprint of the "perfect society." Looking Backward addresses the aspirations of a society stricken by economic panics and social collapse by proposing an Eden-like community where war, hunger, and malice are engineered out of society. After 113 years of sleep, young Julian West awakes in the year 2000 A. D. It is a "post-revolutionary" society in which people and nations have forsaken individual parties and desires of an earlier chaotic age. Looking Backward portrays a contradictory balance between individualism and community.

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