Also banished was romantic love, for that could lead to tragedy, and normal reproduction, for that could lead, equally, to deep human bonds. Huxley, whose generation struggled to deal with the impact of new technology on mass culture, imagined the worst outcomes for the media, with recorded images and music used to subdue the population into a dumbed-down mass. You get the idea behind the names: Huxley thinks this is the kind of dystopia society threatens to turn into under the influences of Materialism, Marxism and Soviet Communism. Bernard Marx does, but he’s too much of a coward ultimately to rebel. Nor will Polly Trotsky when she grows up. Lenina Crowne doesn’t see anything wrong with how things are.

Intellectuals like Helmholz Watson who challenge the stupefying new order risk banishment to an island. Belief in God has been replaced by believe in Ford. No one is allowed to read Shakespeare, and all the great art of the past has been declared unintelligible and useless. A totalitarian state has imposed ‘social stability’ on an England with a mixture of relaxing drugs, somatic stimuli and official Voices cajoling and reprimanding the people who have been reduced to overgrown babies. Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World is a satire on a world that has banished tragedy.

Brave new world ending