Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Huxley’s ingenious fantasy set in the future, sheds a blazing light on the present. Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone in feeling discontent, harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. Is there a cure for his distress?

There are a myriad of ways in which Brave New World still holds a mirror to our own society, despite being published nearly a century ago. As Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death: ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.'