60 Fun Facts About Brave New World

Who wrote Brave New World?

It was his fifth novel and his first dystopia, written in four months in 1931 and published in 1932.

The title Brave New World is a phrase from which Shakespeare play?

Miranda says it on first seeing the shipwrecked visitors, and her father Prospero deflates her with ''Tis new to thee'.

What is the French title of the novel, alluding to Leibniz via Voltaire's Candide?

It means 'The Best of All Worlds'; the Chinese title borrows the Shakespeare line and means 'Beautiful New World'.

Where was Huxley living when he wrote Brave New World?

He wrote it between May and August 1931, having already published four satirical novels.

Huxley said the book began as a parody of which H. G. Wells utopian novel?

He told a friend he had been 'pulling the leg of H. G. Wells' but then 'got caught up in the excitement' of his own ideas.

In what year, by the World State's calendar, does the novel open?

That is AD 2540; the AF era counts from 1908, when the first Model T rolled off the line.

What do the letters AF stand for in the World State's calendar?

Citizens swear 'By Ford!' and Christian crosses have had their tops cut off to make a T for the Model T.

What are the five castes of the World State, from top to bottom?

Each caste wears its own uniform colour and is conditioned to prefer its own lot.

Bokanovsky's Process is a technique for doing what?

The name is thought to nod to Maurice Bokanowski, a French bureaucrat obsessed with efficiency; Podsnap's Technique speeds up egg maturation.

What is the World State's method of teaching children slogans while they sleep called?

In the book it was discovered when a boy named Reuben Rabinovitch memorised speeches in his sleep; real science has since concluded sleep-learning does not work.

What is soma?

Linda eventually dies of an overdose; the name has been compared to real-life Valium.

Where did Huxley get the name soma?

His mid-1920s trip to India also inspired the caste system of the World State.

Which industrialist is revered almost as a god in the World State?

Citizens sometimes say 'Our Freud' instead, and it is implied they think Ford and Freud were the same man.

Which of the carmaker's books did Huxley find on the boat to America and see applied everywhere he went?

The trip left him outraged by youth culture, commercial cheeriness and promiscuity - all of which went into the novel.

Bernard Marx is an Alpha-Plus but a misfit. What is his physical oddity?

An alleged accident with alcohol in his blood-surrogate before decanting is blamed for it.

Where does the Director threaten to exile Bernard?

The threat evaporates when Bernard returns from the Reservation with the Director's own son.

What is Lenina Crowne's job?

She is a Beta who is happy being a Beta, and one of the 30 percent of women who are not sterile 'freemartins'.

What is the name of the contraceptive device women wear in the World State?

It nods to Thomas Malthus, who ironically preferred abstinence to contraception.

The Savage Reservation that Bernard and Lenina visit is in which US state?

Its village culture resembles the Hopi and Zuni pueblo peoples of the region.

What is the name of the Reservation village where John was raised?

John is unwanted there and unwanted in London: an outsider in both worlds.

The only literary book John has ever read is what?

It was left behind by a villager named Popé; the other book Linda owned was a scientific manual.

Who turns out to be John's father?

When John calls him 'father' in public, the room roars with laughter and the Director resigns in shame.

Why is the Director's fatherhood so scandalous in the World State?

All sex is extramarital there; what is obscene is that a child was actually born from it.

Helmholtz Watson chooses exile to which remote place, hoping bad weather will help his writing?

Mustapha Mond tells him exile is really a reward: the islands hold the most interesting people in the world.

What is Mustapha Mond's title?

He presides over one of ten zones set up after the Nine Years' War and the great Economic Collapse.

The World Controller's surname comes from which British industrialist with a Billingham chemical plant?

The first name is thought to nod to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who was remaking Turkey as Huxley wrote.

The World State's motto is 'Community, Identity' and what?

Mond argues that art, literature and free science must be sacrificed to secure it.

How does Mond sum up John's position at the end of their debate?

John asks to be sent to an island too, and Mond refuses because he wants to see what happens next.

Where does John retreat to live as a hermit at the end of the novel?

A filmmaker's secret footage of his self-flagellation, 'The Savage of Surrey', turns him into a spectacle.

How does the novel end for John?

Reporters arriving after a soma-fuelled orgy find the body.

Fanny Crowne shares Lenina's surname for what reason?

Fanny nags Lenina to be more promiscuous, since concentrating on one man is unseemly.

The economist Ludwig von Mises read the novel in 1944 as a satire of what?

G. K. Chesterton, by contrast, called it 'more of a revolution against Utopia than against Victoria'.

Which country banned Brave New World in the year of its publication, 1932?

India followed in 1967, branding Huxley a 'pornographer'.

Where did the Modern Library rank Brave New World on its 1998 list of the 100 best 20th-century novels?

The BBC's Big Read survey put it 87th, and Royal Mail featured it on a 2021 stamp series.

Who wrote 'Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us'?

It comes from the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), which grew out of a Frankfurt Book Fair panel on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Which Russian novel did Orwell believe Brave New World was partly derived from?

Kurt Vonnegut cheerfully admitted ripping off the plot of Brave New World for Player Piano.

What is Huxley's 1958 non-fiction follow-up to his dystopian novel titled?

Between the two books he had converted to Hindu Vedanta, and the sequel dwells on overpopulation, drugs and subliminal suggestion.

Huxley's final novel, the utopian counterpart to Brave New World, is set on the fictional island of what?

A cynical journalist named Will Farnaby is shipwrecked there.

Which future dystopian novelist was taught French by Huxley at Eton?

Huxley was remembered as an incompetent schoolmaster who could not keep order, though Eric Blair spoke highly of his vocabulary.

What illness in 1911 left the teenage Huxley nearly blind for two or three years?

It ended his hopes of a medical career and got him rejected by the army in 1916.

Aldous's grandfather was which Victorian scientist, nicknamed 'Darwin's Bulldog'?

His brother Julian and half-brother Andrew, a Nobel laureate, both became distinguished biologists.

Huxley died on 22 November 1963, the same day as which two other famous men?

At his request his wife Laura injected him with LSD hours before he died.

Which studio commissioned Huxley in 1945 to write an Alice in Wonderland script that was never used?

He did get screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940) and reportedly earned over $3,000 a week, much of it spent helping refugees from Hitler.

Who plays Mustapha Mond in the 1998 NBC television film of Brave New World?

This version adds a twist: Lenina gets pregnant by Bernard and the two flee into exile with their daughter.

The 2020 television adaptation of Brave New World premiered on which streaming service?

It had been developed for Syfy and then USA Network before moving; it was cancelled after one season.

Iron Maiden's album Brave New World (2000) marked the return of which singer to the band?

Guitarist Adrian Smith also came back, making Maiden a six-piece for the first time.

Which 1921 Huxley novel has a passage foreshadowing the bottle-bred future of Brave New World?

The character Mr Scogan imagines 'vast state incubators' with 'rows upon rows of gravid bottles' supplying the population.

Who narrated the 1956 CBS Radio Workshop adaptation of Brave New World?

Bernard Herrmann composed the music and William Conrad introduced the two-part broadcast.

Which 1993 Sylvester Stallone film is said to draw heavily on Brave New World?

The film's sanitised future San Angeles echoes the novel's engineered contentment.

Who left behind the copy of Shakespeare that John reads on the Reservation?

Popé was Linda's lover, who also brought her mescal; the villagers otherwise gave the pair a hard life.

In which country was Brave New World banned in 1967, with Huxley accused of being a 'pornographer'?

The novel was also banned in Ireland in its publication year and later challenged repeatedly in US schools.

In the World State, what share of the female population is required to be freemartins?

Freemartins are women sterilised in the bottle by exposure to male hormones, physically normal apart from 'the slightest tendency to grow beards'.

Helmholtz Watson's first name is derived from a physicist of which nationality?

Hermann von Helmholtz lends his surname to the disaffected lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering.

According to Bernard, an accident with what in his blood-surrogate left him stunted?

The alleged mishap before his decanting is offered as the reason an Alpha-Plus is unusually short.

Which psychoanalyst's name is sometimes swapped in for Ford's in World State oaths?

Citizens are strongly implied to believe Ford and Freud were the same person.

Which real-life leader also inspired the name of the World Controller Mustapha Mond?

Atatürk was remaking the old Ottoman state into a new nation while Huxley was writing.

Which pueblo elder teaches John skills such as coil pottery and bow-making?

The shaman's lessons are among the few kindnesses John receives on the Reservation.

In 2021, Brave New World appeared on a UK postage stamp series celebrating what?

Royal Mail picked six classic sci-fi novels by British authors for the set.

How many surnames are in use across the World State's population of two billion?

That is why Lenina and Fanny Crowne share a name without being related.

Which of Lenina's lovers does she remember as particularly hairy without his clothes?

Hoover is one of several bottle-born names borrowed from politicians and industrialists of Huxley's day.