Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 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 Big Read survey by the BBC.
`The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out'. Aldous Huxley first took mescalin in 1953 and continued his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs until 1963 when, on his deathbed, he asked for and was given LSD. Huxley explores the effects of the mescalin experience, describing how the drug enabled him to discover a `sacramental vision of reality'. He also discusses the spiritual and moral implications of the experience, demonstrating how negative emotions can transform man's perceptual Nirvana into a `schizophrenic hell'.
