Eighty-one years ago this month, while living in the south of France, Aldous Huxley completed his timeless satire about an infantilized, drug-dependent, science-controlled, consumer society — much like our own.

In late May 1931, the 36-year-old Huxley, overwhelmed by a “literary catastrophe,” tossed away a month’s work on his novel-in-progress, cancelled a trip to Russia with his brother Julian, and rewrote the entire thing. By August he’d completed the dystopia he called Brave New World , after Miranda’s line in The Tempest : “O brave new world that has such people in’t.”

Satires tend to tire with time, but not Brave New World : It still manages to offend. Last year American librarians ranked it among the top 10 novels that readers wanted to see banned. Huxley’s book debuted in 1932: the British sang its praises, the Irish banned it, the Americans were lukewarm.

“The book is selling hard” in England, a pleased Huxley wrote to a friend in February 1932, admitting it had been “rather badly received” by American critics. Yet today the American Modern Library ranks it fifth among its 100 best novels. Reading Huxley’s masterwork in the summer of 2012 delivers a shiver of recognition.

The year is 632 A.F. (After Ford, as in Henry, the New World’s philosopher-god of the assembly line). That would be 2540 AD. The past is absent from school curricula, for, as Ford proclaimed, “History is bunk.” Sexual promiscuity is mandated by the state; birth control pills are worn on women’s belts, a fashion item. If pills fail, abortion is available. Huxley’s “symbol of the New World, its crest,” is the zipper; he suspected the book’s merrily unzipping zippers explained American attitudes to his novel.

“Community, Identity, Stability” are guaranteed. Sad, anxious thoughts? Whisk them away with side-effect-free mood boosters (soma). “A gramme is better than a damn.” (Huxley’s spelling can seem antique.) So far, so familiar. The book opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where each fetus, scientifically designed for its class (Alpha, Beta, Gamma and so on) is ripened in its bottle, then decanted. The family is extinct.

Sleeping New World children hear whispered messages — “I love new clothes, I love new clothes” — like TV ads aimed at kids today, or like President George W. Bush’s comforting message to a panicked America: “Go shopping.” With no messy family life, no looking back, human lives are trauma-free. “No pains have been spared,” students touring the Hatchery are told, “to preserve you, as far as possible, from having any emotions at all.”

That bugbear, aging, is unknown. Sexagenarians, “youthful and taut-skinned, slim and upright,” await painless deaths that are followed by efficient cremation. “A kilo and a half of phosphorous per adult corpse” is recovered for fertilizer. It’s not only efficient; it’s terrifying.

Granted, women today bear their babies viviparously (Huxley still sends us to the dictionary), like other mammals. But high-profilers — Victoria Beckham, Gwyneth Paltrow, Beyoncé — regain their trim shapes with astonishing, and much admired, speed. The “momshell” (mother-as-bombshell) has succeeded the Yummy Mummy, a phenomenon bemoaned by Janice Min, non-trim new mother and former US magazine writer, in last Sunday’s New York Times.

Huxley gleefully predicted Octomom, too — without the mom of course. His “Bokanovsky Process” produced up to 96 identical bottled twins but scientists were aiming for more; his “Podsnap’s Technique” hastened the ripening of fertilized eggs. Huxley’s science was flawless — all in the family, you might say. T.H. Huxley, his biologist grandfather, was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his vigorous defence of evolutionary theory and brother Julian, evolutionary biologist and eugenicist, was the first UNESCO director and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.

Aldous was very tall, nearly blind from an infection of the corneas in adolescence — he learned Braille at age 16 — brainy in the extreme, tirelessly curious and kind. His was a rough childhood — his beloved mother died from cancer when he was 14; his closest brother, Trev, hanged himself when Aldous was an Oxford undergraduate.

Unable to pursue a medical career due to his vision, he wrote books, 50 books: satires, novels of ideas, collections of philosophical essays, travel books. His wide sphere of friends included Bloomsbury intellectuals but also rebels like DH Lawrence, the coal miner’s son whose favourite hobby was attacking the establishment. Lawrence died from tuberculosis in France, in the arms of Aldous’s Belgian wife, Maria Nys. Huxley helped with the estate and edited Lawrence’s letters, securing an income for his widow, Frieda.

By the time of Brave New World , the Huxleys (they had a son, Matthew) had been living abroad because it was cheap — and sunny. First in Italy, then France and, finally, in 1937, they moved permanently to California. By then Huxley had become an outspoken pacifist; his friend Gerald Heard had introduced him to meditation to help with chronic insomnia.

In California his eclectic circle included Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, expat writer Christopher Isherwood and Hollywood insider Anita Loos ( Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ). Greta Garbo was a neighbour. The Huxleys had first seen Jazz Age America at the end of their 1926 world tour, which may explain the resemblance between California girls and New World assembly-line beauties.

Somehow, this near-blind English intellectual had seen the future. His New World entertainments include druggy “Solidarity Services (“orgy-porgy”) that prefigure our Ecstasy-fuelled discos; date nights at the “Feelies” (porn, more or less), and a rage for all things synthetic: clothes, perfumes, music. A typical evening out ends with soma-popping and soulless coupling. Oh Ford, pass the Prozac.

After much clever exposition, Huxley’s plot takes off. Bernard Marx, an Alpha Plus malcontent — the brainy ones are always the hardest to control — develops a crush on “wonderfully pneumatic” Lenina Crowne, a Beta, but Bernard is considered strange; bottle-days mistakes perhaps. Yet Bernard is like us, with his awkwardness, self-pity and resentments — Brave New World’s own Larry David.

Worse, he’s a thinker, despite knowing it’s his “duty to be infantile” even against his inclinations. Does this sound at all like today’s politicians? (Just wondering.) When Bernard derides Electro-magnetic Golf as a waste of time, the astonished Lenina asks, “Then what’s time for?” Clearly, for wasting and getting wasted. “Everyone’s happy now” sounds more and more like a threat. Holidays are frequent; music and TV ubiquitous. Solitude is weird, scary.

Unsurprisingly, Lenina worries about her weight and regards herself as “meat.” Bernard should know. A psychologist, he writes the programs that relentlessly condition New World children, muttering to himself, “Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen.”

Still, he persuades her to visit a New Mexico “Reservation” — a treat available only to the Alpha Plus. Although the Amerindians, penned in by electrified fences, exude resentment toward their visitors, “they have enough experience of gas bombs not to play any tricks.” New World tourists are quite safe, like today’s tourists who seek out similarly penned-in destinations. Rough Guide offers tips for the “fortunate and intrepid” (and wealthy) traveller, to North Korea.

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Even before watching a summer festival dance that ends with the whipping of a young male penitent, Lenina longs for her soma, which she’s left behind at the rest house. The shock of seeing bent old age for the first time is almost too much. Bernard patiently explains that New Worlders enjoy “youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then crack! the end.”

More startling is their discovery of a Beta woman, stranded on holiday in New Mexico years before. Fat, wrinkled Linda is a horror. Worse, she’s a natural mother — the word itself is an obscenity. Back in London, Linda and her son, John the Savage, become National Enquirer-style curiosities.

The Miranda of this world, John the Savage recites — however improbably — lines from his battered old volume of Shakespeare. Inevitably, this outsider meets a sad end, exposed and humiliated in the London press. Paparazzi we’d say, though Fellini didn’t coin that term until 1960.

If Brave New World omits something big, it’s not nuclear fission, as Huxley thought, but the Internet — what E.M. Forster called “the machine” in his 1909 story, “The Machine Stops.” Nevertheless Huxley’s “Swiftian satire” mirrors our Internet world, minus the software. Indulged Betas and Alphas are the great-grandparents of today’s texters and sexters — though it’s tough to imagine Huxley on Facebook or Twitter.

My tattered copy of Huxley’s dystopia comes with his 1946 foreword, written after the devastating war years and the horror of Hiroshima. Huxley confessed that his younger self had found it “amusing and quite possibly true” that “human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other.”

By 1946 Huxley saw the nightmare he’d predicted looming ever closer. The successful dictator, he warned, would encourage “the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio.” Or, possibly, go shopping. The ideal he now proposes is his “third alternative . . . the possibility of sanity.”

In Island , his 1962 utopia, Huxley describes an anti-Brave New World that was especially attractive to youthful rebels in the 1960s and ’70s: a breakaway society with a decentralized economy, political cooperation and “(s)cience and technology used…as though they had been made for man, not…as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End, the intuitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos.”

Drugs in his island utopia expand rather than quiet the mind. In May 1953, Huxley first experimented with mescaline, given to him by a visiting British psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, then working in Weyburn, Sask. Osmond hoped that psychedelics (he coined the term in a letter to Huxley) would help schizophrenics and alcoholics.

Huxley’s ended his guided trip pouring over art books in The World’s Biggest Drugstore; he wrote about his mescaline afternoon in 1954’s The Doors of Perception, a title borrowed from poet William Blake. Jim Morrison borrowed Huxley’s title when naming his band in 1965.

Reading Huxley is, as ever, a heady experience. When he responded in 1949 to George Orwell, who’d sent him a copy of 1984 , Huxley wrote how much he’d admired Orwell’s book, but still believed his own vision of a drug-coddled Western culture was a better prediction of the future than Orwell’s “boot in the face.”

As a seer, Huxley was very often right. He warned against abusing the Earth, derided materialism, worried about overpopulation: he urged a rapprochement between art and science. He believed one could be both an agnostic and a mystic. No wonder The Beatles included him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper .