For me I think the three person conversation in chapter three was a bit of a conflict. You have the world director saying how bad the past was and how horrible familial relations are and you have Bernard and Lenina, in a sense, saying how they want these relationships. She says on page 46 no there hasn’t been anyone else and I jolly dont see why there should have been. Then when she agrees that she should see someone else she isn’t talking about seeing multiple other people just one other person Bernard. As the director then talks about how they produced the perfect drug soma page 59 and sixty you have Bernard a few sentences later on turning down the perfect drug and he is described as fending it off. So it makes you think is this society really as perfect as it appears to be? And was the past really that bad? Another topic I wanted to discuss was the whole hedonism, promiscuity value, idea this society has. Coming from a social stand point I guess you can say,  sex is a pleasurable it releases all these great chemicals in your brain that make you feel good. But on the other hand it is a way to build bonds, connect with people, create emotionally attachments to people, it can go so much deeper than hey this feels good I wonder why they promote it? Yes if you have sex with multiple people you can diminish the emotional part but you can’t totally eliminate it I think. Maybe Lenina enjoyed sex with Henry so much that’s why she stayed with him for four months and by staying with him that’s where the emotional attachments starts to form etc. I guess this puzzles me because to me sex is way more than yes this feels good, it can lead to so many other more feelings that can be adverse to what the state values.

The book “Brave New World” reminds me of something i have read in the past or maybe it was the same book, am just not sure.

All the  short stories that we have read so far and the first 5 chapters of this book all have a similarities. Like soma, the drug soma was also mentioned in Le Guin, also the idea of sexuality and orgys were also mentioned in one of Le Guin’s short stories. While i made this observation, i thought about how most of these utopia created places have all of this. When we think of a utopia, the most common idea would be perfect. But in my opinion the world in this novel is horrible. The way human life is controlled to the point where, they make you as smart or dumb as they choose or think u belong in. In the first chapter the way they treat human life or think of it is pretty much inhumane. They make humans sound like machines especially when they speak about the gametes producing ninety-six identical twins designed to manage identical machines.

Another part that also impacted me was how they put alcohol when the process of fertilization is going on to control the smartness of the human. And when they shock the babies with electricity to make them scare of books and flowers so when they grow old they ever read to gain knowledge. The method they use to make babies scare of books, and flowers was used in real life by an actual psychologist. In this society everything and everyone is so controlled by the superiors. The way they are born, where your born, how you look, what your life is like.  The government has a tight control over everyone including the economical part. Referring back to the part where they would shock babies when they would touch a flower so they could grow fear for flowers. The only reason why they would do that was to control the economic expenses these babies would make when they were older. Its kind of the way you train a dog to do tricks. In this novel technology has taken over the world so much that human life is no longer valued. So far we know about humans being born from test tubes in control places, to be born a certain way.

I think the biggest theme in this utopian dystopian novel is perfection. Machines tend to do everything to perfection. Just because they are designed to do one thing and one thing only. Just how all these babies where being created they had a purpose even before they were born. This “perfect” is controlled by its superiors. The controversial thing the author did her though was introduce a character like Bernard. Who unlike everyone else is a misfit in many ways. He looks different and thinks different. He is like an outcast among his own group. Its very hard to create a utopia with human, because we are all so different and have different ideas of whats good for us.

In this book for chapter one it seem to be kids on a tour of some sort inside the London Hatchery that has a factory lab that produces human beings. They is surgery that removes ovaries to make ova that are fertilize. The use of the ova to create human clones. Page 17 in the book at the last paragraph I got the idea that they make humans by cloning. It says “One egg, one embryo, one adult normality. From eighty to ninety six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full sized adult. Making ninety six human beings grow where only one grew before”. That sound like it is saying it take one real human being to create how many they want. The director spoke about mass production applied to biology to the kids on the tour. This meaning he has to technology to mass produce human beings and not just products like our society today. On page 19 the director told the kids that there was a technique call Podsnaps that accelerate the ripen process to make sure at least a hundred n fifty mature eggs within two years. This machine has a process to producing these humans that can take up to months to years but seem to be long but really isn’t because when it is finally done there will be so many identical sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers at the same age.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is oddly entertaining.  This book is interesting because it gives us an insight to a world that we do not live in.  This “utopia” to some may be a “distopia” to others.  To me, this world is a distopia.  The world that these characters live in is messed up.  We no longer create beings through intercourse, but now we create beings in labs.  I call these things beings because they cannot be considered human in my eyes.  This new way of development called Bokanovskifying creates beings by the multiple.  Not just one or two beings, but thousands of identical beings categorized by classes (using Greek terminology, which to me is weird because the narrator points out the fact that many languages such as French, German, and Polish are instinct.)  When reading about this Bokanovski group of beings, I asked myself, what is wrong with diversity?  Is there any diversity in this world that these characters live in?  The narrator points out the fact that there are multiple races (African American for example.)  So what is this issue of diversity if technically diversity exists in this world?

While reading Brave New World, I can make a text to text comparison.  This book reminds me of The Hunger Games in multiple ways.  These books are similar in the fact that in both stories, people are divided by class.  In Brave New World, the people are divided using Greek terminology such as Alpha, Betas, and Gammas, while in The Hunger Games, the people are divided into districts.  Another comparison can be the fact that there is one group of individuals ruling the people of the world.  In Brave New World, this individual is the DHC, while in The Hunger Games, this leading individual is President Snow.  These leaders are even similar in the fact that they dress in their white suits.

While reading Brave New World, I also made the connection of these generated beings to the Aryan race.  To me, it seems like the DHC is creating a group of alike individuals who have “no flaws.”  The beings that are being created are conditioned to the liking of the DHC.  In chapter 2, the Delta babies (all dressed in Khaki) were conditioned to form a fear of books and flowers.  The narrator states “you can’t have lower-caste people wasting the Community’s time over books.”  Also, the narrator states ” a love of nature keeps no factories busy.”  Today, people are conditioned to read books and educate themselves and to go outdoors and not stay in front of the television.

In some ways, the characters in Brave New World are similar to the people in our world.  For example, in Brave New World, the scientists in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre inject the embryos with typhoids and sleeping sickness to “immunize the fish against the future man’s disease.”  Today, we do the dame thing.  At a young age, we immunize humans so they will not be effected by the diseases of the world.

Brave New World is a story originally published in the early 1900s, and in some ways predicted the future (the time period we are in now) and will probably predict events that will occur hundreds of years from now.

The first couple of pages of Brave New World and Brave New World Revisted written by Aldous Huxley caught my attention almost immediately. The title itself was confusing when trying to connect the ideas with utopias and dystopias, but as I kept reading, I merged and concluded the topics instantly.

Right away, I was astonished as to why the students visiting the facility worshiped the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning to the point where his words were considered “gold”; the students took notes on absolutely everything he stated. I thought about the possible respect they had for the Director, however, what could he possibly have done or invented to be praised upon all? I was in utter shock to realize his work and his intensions to possibly create his own world.

The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is in charge of his own operation, in my opinion, like a laboratory to multiply and/or create human beings, specifically groups of twins by simply using one embryo. I thought about his concept and I concluded that he possibly wanted to have this method of creating human beings to populate “his world” and since they will be participants in his mind, they all shall be operated through him. The comparison I had in mind was forcing human beings to be a part of his creation, ruled by his own regulations without an opinion to be stated; kind of like slavery–to an extent.

But what was most shocking is the Director’s plan of conditioning upon the babies created by Bokanovsky’s Process, is that they intend to control the product of the embryos and have full control on how their lives will be. The author states, “No wonder these poor pre-modern were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy” (47 Huxley). This statement emphasized on the idea the Director had in mind, control. But why control the possible citizens in his possession? Why create duplicates using only one single embryo? What is its purpose?

While reading the first five chapters of the novel and connecting it to the english course I am currently enrolled in (topics of Utopia and Dystopia) I have convinced myself that the Director has envisioned his utopian world consisting of the perfect, full-control, over-populated citizens to be a member in his world. With the constant analysis, test tubes, examinations and so on, it is clear that the Director is focused on the idea of perfection and controlling every aspect of it as possible. I may be wrong, but why else would someone be this mad? To carefully and constantly make examinations in creating the perfect specimen and using operant conditioning to control them?

I believe the idea of operant conditioning is very powerful. I once studied this in my psychology class, although it was several months ago, I remember it vaguely. I remember there is a positive and negative conditioning, and although I don’t remember it perfectly, I remember the impact it had on the patient/target and how it controls their mind. The connection here is, by the Director of  Hatcheries and Conditioning, using conditioning to control the products of one single embryo, he may well be closer to creating his “perfect” world consisting of “perfect” citizens.

I may be wrong in theory but I strongly stand by it. As I read on the next chapters, it can make or break my conclusion. We shall wait and see.

After reading the first few chapters of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley , Im still every unclear of the plot of the story. I like how the author has his ideal idea of utopian society of the future, how he divides people not by class but by the caste system. In which he people are categorize by either Alpha Beta Gamma Delta and Epsilon. People in this utopian society don’t get to choose what category they fall in, there given to them by birth in which i i disapprove from. I believe people should grow up to be who ever they want to be, no one should be force to do something or be on someone they don’t want to. In Chapter one , the author explains how each fetus is treated differently depending on which castes state they fall in to. For gamma , deltas and epsilon eggs are shocked so that they are weaken and become less society stable. The Author also explains to use that a person position in the caste system is usually recognize by the type of clothes they wear. For example deltas would wear khaki colored clothes. In Chapter 2 what I found pretty instering was the way they made babies dislike books and flowers. Reading it at first i didn’t understand why someone would do that but as i kept reading it made sense. By creating fear into an object a child would want , it would make them not want it any more. and in the infant nurseries room thats what they did they created fear in the babies by shocking them with loud noises such as alarms sounds while they crawled to the books and flowers. The Author explains that by doing this the babies develop a hatred toward the objects. in which makes them not want them anymore. I find this strategy pretty smart but cruel as well. We are also introduce to two Alpha males Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson. Also to Lenina    a worker in the conditioning centre. Also Henry Foster i really don’t know his position in the centre but he seem to explain the center to the group of kids . I notice while reading that there was a love triangle between Henry Foster and Bernard toward Lenina. Although i believe love is forbidden in this society because no man belongs to no women. One word i got suck on while reading was the word hypnopaedia , while later on i found out it meant learning by hearing while asleep. i was so lost when the Director was telling the story of the little boy who learned while hearing the radio his parents had left on. On page 36 the Director describes Hypnopaedia as ” The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time” in which really caught my attention. I didn’t even know people could learn while they were asleep. Is this gonna affect the Society since the hole point of stopping delta babies from reading and writing is to that they remain in that caste system? I was getting confused after that. Also the drug soma was introduce although I’m still every unclear what it is, i believe it helps people go to sleep for a long period of time. This book is little hard to understand for the fact that is seems to change from story to story. I look forward to reading more of it .. -Arturo

Brave New World is a book that I’m happy to read and I just could not put the book down with the limited amount of chapters I read thus far. Instantly, I was able to identify the characters and just how cruel, yet subtly brilliant the story is. I won’t go too in-depth with a summary but from the chapters I read, a group of young students (assuming aspiring scientists) go on a tour in a building called Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Building. It’s where groups of scientists experiment with fertilization of humans and embryos. The story I was instantly able to connect this with was E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” because it’s two similar passages of science gone wrong. Comparing both story and passage, it takes a very intelligent, boundary breaking, amazing concept, and turns it for the worst.

Mr. Foster and the director of the “tour” take the students around the building and show them their experiments with the embryos and the fertilization, and during this I experienced some horrible, yet amazing discoveries as the story went deeper and deeper as their tour went on. One of the parts I couldn’t believe was when the scientists experimenting with the fertilized babies in chapter 2. They tested these innocent babies just for the sake of science. Something I would always think about is scientists doing experiments and test on animals and critters. But reading on I already knew something bad was going down behind all of this. I connected the text with utopia and that’s exactly what the Director and Mr. Foster want to do. They want to create the “perfect” humans.

“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…” He was going to say “future World controllers” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries” instead”. (Huxley 23)

I didn’t know how I felt about humans being tested on this way, and not just humans, but embryos and fertilization being tested on just to create a separate specimen of human beings. It was crazy to put in perspective that somewhere out there scientists are actually doing this in real life, and it’s scary to think about what they might create in the future or worse what they may not create. The story takes place in A.F. 632 which takes place in the future beyond today’s civilization. The scientists seem to want to weed out the past crop of human civilization and create a new, “perfect” line of humans but what’s stopping them is the delays in getting their formulas right. I’m hoping they never get anything right just for the sake of creating something they’d wish they never would’ve created because this experiment can always turn their backs on the scientists. I thinking creating something way too experimentally controlled can always have it’s cons and I’m interested to keep reading what will be made of all of this. The perfect child of blonde hair and blue eyes can’t be made chemically, just like life, it’s made organically.

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.

I believe that A Brave New World is about a dystopia. In which values are not the ones that you would probably think if us having today. They’re emphasized values are the ones that were assigned to them based on the class they belong too. Which ranges from Alpha-Delta. Everyone is taught their specific values and rules through Elementary Class Consciousness. The D.H.C. Says “They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake” (Huxley Pg.35). They are being taught through repition in their sleep and when the lesson is done this will go with them forever. I see happiness in this society being determined by the values you are taught as well. They are teaching them to think that whatever class they belong too is the best and that being in any other class would be worse. This is also taught through Eementary Class Consciousness.

Science and technology are advanced in A Brave New World. “The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg” (Huxley pg. 18). A single egg could produce 96 identical twins. These 96 twins coming from the same ovary and the same male. Which is truly beyond normal. They also use lifts and planes as well as helicopters to fly to places, there has been nothing about cars. In the text it is also mentioned that they use the drug soma. ” There is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two Grammies for a trip to the gorgeous East” (Huxley pg.62). They would take soma which would create some kind of happiness and escape from the world. My question is why would they need an escape from their world and are they unhappy? If so, why? When you think about drugs you think about people wanting to get away from the world they are living in and being unhappy with the life they live.

Another thing that caught my eye was the way they refer to women in the text. Henry Foster says “Oh, she’s a splendid girl. Wonderfully pneumatic. I’m surprised you haven’t had her” ( Huxley pg.49). It seems as women are seen to be sexually promiscuous. As if they’re just seen to be with any man that asks them. He also refers to her body figure like its the only thing she has to offer. In chapter 4 it also says ” She was a popular girl and at, one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them” (Huxley pg.63). This would be something that in today’s day is most likely frowned upon when a woman sleeps around. In the book it seems to be something good and something which makes you popular which is also a good thing.

From pages 82-86 in the book I was completely lost and maybe I didn’t think it through thoroughly but I definitely didn’t know what was going on. I know they all took soma and it was something like a party and they were referring to someone coming but I had no idea what was going on. Another thing I noticed was that the women were required to take contraceptives. They were taught this from the ages of 12-17. ” Years of intensive hypnopaedia and, from twelve to seventeen” (Huxley pg.80). Even though Lenina was as drugged as she was she still remembered to take them because as stated in the text “It was almost as blinking”(Huxley pg 80).

The novel “Brave New World”  by Christopher Higgens is a very gripping novel about a futuristic society that is quite different from our own.  The book describes this society in which the central government has complete control over the population through various means. To start they control the actual population number by “manufacturing” people in factories in a sense. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning seems to oversee this process. They have dubbed this process “the   Bokanovsky process” . In the first few chapters of the novel,  he is giving a group of students a tour of the factory. He explains how they take a single embryo and turn it into 96 exact copies. They get developed over this long track that runs around the factory. Every 24 meters, a nurse then injects some type of hormone into the container,  depending on what type of worker they r making. They travel around this track for quite some time. It takes 2040 meters to complete. believe this to be a method of some sort of quality control for the factories that these people will work in. The quality of the product will be the exact same because the same person is creating it more or less.  Not only are the people physically the same, but they are mentally the same. They achieve this through brainwashing them while they sleep.   The factory pretty much sets the social destiny of the type of person they are conditioning. They are forced to accept what they are given and enjoy it.  The population is split between some type of social classes named Alpha,  Beta,  Delta,  Gamma and Epsilon. As the book progresses,  i get the feeling that some of the classes look down on others.  For example they constantly make fun of the deltas for wearing khaki pants.  Seems to be that the delta,  gamma and Epsilons are the lower members of society.

Even with all of this conditioning and social belonging,  there doesn’t seem to be any likes of the social problems we see in todays world such as poverty, crime, and homelessness.  Because everyone is happy with who they are and how they are there isnt any type of issues like i stated before.  Other things that are a lot different is the views of sex and relationships in that matter.  In the novel, it is normal to have multiple sexual partners and its actually abnormal if you are with the same person for longer than a few months. The society also frowns upon people getting pregnant. They also seem to practice sex at a very young age,  as young as preteens it seems.  In today’s society, people usually become sexually active in high school. It almost seems to be the opposite of our society today as far as their moral values are concerned.

Another thing that they seem to have abolished in the novel is the types of religion that we have today such and Catholic, Christian, Judaism, hindu,  ect.  Instead they seem to worship Henry Ford as a type of God. I guess this is because Ford invented the assembly line which is very common to them. Like today Catholics say Bc and Ac for before christ anf after christ. In the book they say  af instead for After Ford. Another way that they hint that Ford is viewed as a God is how they talk. Instead of saying “Oh God”  like we do today, they say “Oh Ford”.