Brave New World - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...

's fifth novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology

Reproductive technology

Reproductive technology encompasses all current and anticipated uses of technology in human and animal reproduction, including assisted reproductive technology, contraception and others.-Assisted reproductive technology:...

and sleep-learning

Sleep-learning

Sleep-learning attempts to convey information to a sleeping person, typically by playing a sound recording to them while they sleep....

that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurology

Futurology

Futures studies is the study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science. In general, it can be considered as a branch under the more general scope of the field of...

. Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), summarised below, and with his final work, a novel titled Island

Island (novel)

Island is the final book by English writer Aldous Huxley, published in 1962. It is the account of Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala. Island is Huxley's utopian counterpart to his most famous work, the 1932 novel Brave New World, itself often...

(1962).

In 1999, the Modern Library

Modern Library

The Modern Library is a publishing company. Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright as an imprint of their publishing company Boni & Liveright, it was purchased in 1925 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer...

ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Brave New Worlds ironic title derives from Miranda's

Miranda (Shakespeare)

In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Miranda is the beautiful daughter of the old Duke Prospero.Cast away with her father since she was three years old, she has lived an extremely sheltered existence. Though she has received a well-rounded education from her father, she is desperately lacking in real...

speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:
This line itself is ironic; Miranda was raised for most of her life on an isolated island, and the only people she ever knew were her father and his servants, an enslaved savage and a spirit.