From Brave New World to Island. Aldous Huxley's (Negative) Utopias

      Аннотация: Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an Anglo-American novelist, essayist, dramatist, poet, screenplay writer and lecturer. He studied at Oxford, where he started writing short stories and poems (Jonah, The Burning Wheel…). Huxley is, probably, best-known for his novels Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), Eyeless in Gaza (1936), and Island (1962), and essays Doors of Perception (1954) or Brave New World Revisited (1958). Brave New World takes place in the far future, in which the World Controllers have created an ideal society. The masses are conditioned to believe they are happy, the society has an impenetrable caste system, stability is maintained through brainwashing and a drug called soma. Island, on the other hand, takes place in the 20th century on a paradisiacal island called Pala, on which its inhabitants live a harmonious life until the young Raja takes over. He is agog for power and technological progress, and changes this democratic society into a dictatorship. Let’s find out what do these two novels have in common and what the differences, concerning life, love, family, approach to drugs and view of the society, are.

Ключевые слова: Brave New World, Buddhism, family, fordism, island, love, Aldous Huxley, social tastes, soma, Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning, hypnopaedia, Bokanovsky's Process, moksha-medicine, Mutual Adoption Club