#32 in Dystopian
Brave New World
- 251
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
- Series 2020 +2
- On screen
- Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
- 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Our view
Huxley’s dystopia frightens with comfort rather than cruelty: a society engineered so that no one suffers, and no one strives. Its central question, what a painless life costs, has lost none of its edge, and readers keep finding their own era in it. The satire is dry, and ideas drive the book more than events, with the outsider John serving chiefly to test the system. A natural choice for anyone who likes fiction that argues.
Worth knowing Huxley wrote it in about four months in 1931, and the title is Miranda’s line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Where Orwell imagined control through fear, Huxley imagined control through pleasure and conditioning, and the two books are often read as a pair. In Brave New World Revisited (1958) he argued the world was heading his way faster than he had expected. He died on 22 November 1963, the same day as C. S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
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 seemingly utopian society which is challenged by an outsider character, John the Savage. 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. This novel is often used as a companion piece or inversion counterpart to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 3 times — from 1980 to 2020.
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.8 across 4,587 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 97% of the weight and the score stays at 7.8 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.9 | 476 | 10% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 4.1K | 90% |
Frequently asked
How long is Brave New World?
It has 251 pages — shorter than 83% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.1 and 8.5, closest to this book.
