Reading this story, it kind of reminded me of one of the previous stories that we read, The Machine Stops. In the novel Brave New World starts off describing a factory which I believe may be one of the main settings of the story. The setting is located in London at Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The story takes place at some weird time in the future. In this factory human beings are being produce by asexual production instead of sexual production (as already mentioned by Kali). In the factory the babies are being created in test tubes, with preselected destinies already planned out for them. In said factory, the babies are also being placed in a caste system that consists of Gamma, Beta, Delta, Alpha, and Epsilon. It’s obvious that this story is dystopian, by the fact that everyone has preselected destinies and placed into a caste system.

At the beginning of the story, there’s a group of students that are being given a tour of the factory by the director. The students are given the run down about how the process works with creating the test tube babies. The author Aldous Huxley uses plenty of imagery to make the reader get the feel of the setting. It makes you feel like as if you are really there experiencing it.

In chapter two, the thing that stood out to me the most was the experiment that the nurses did with the babies. The nurse presents flowers and books to a group of babies. The babies are allowed to play and get familiar with the items. Then the nurse sets of an alarm and an electric shock to the babies. At this point the babies are screaming with terror. Afterwards the nurse tries to present the items to the babies again, but they refuse. Now in the babies mind, they believe that the flowers and books set off the alarm and the electric shock. So now they don’t want to play with it anymore. This reminded me of something I learned in one of my psychology classes. This is called Pavlov Classical Condition (also mentioned by Denise). They did this to get them to like and dislike certain things.

In this timeframe peoples thoughts and actions were controlled by a higher authority. Who they would become what they did, what they would like and dislike was not in their hands to control.

In the novel, the author uses repetition a lot. One of the phrases that he emphasizing is “every one belongs to every one else.” This quote means to me that everyone shares significant others. Well technically, they cant really be significant if they aren’t yours to have.

This story isn’t really the most interesting so far, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and read more.