Numero Tres

I've decided that instead of focusing intensely only on the connections between Brave New World and 1984 and the real life cultural climate of this time period, I would like to give some real consideration to comparison between the two books specifically and the writer's motivations for writing them.

Huxley wrote Brave New World as a warning against the over-modernization of the world. This view stemmed from fear around the world that the drastic increase in scientific innovation would lead to the destruction of society as it was known. This fear never quite went away. Suspicions of the evil nature of technology even escalated to the point where people believed technology was going to take over the planet on January 1st, 2000. This, of course, never happened. Huxley uses soma, the test tube babies, and the destruction of the traditional family model to grab the reader's gut reaction and make them feel disgusted by this sort of technology take-over.

While this sort of warning was his main point in writing the novel, there are also some undertones of warning against totalitarian regime in Brave New World. The presence of an all-powerful leader, the removal of individuality among citizens, and the total control of the government are all direct characteristics of totalitarian-type government. This leads me to believe that this was also something he was warning against. Given the time period in which he wrote the book, the 1920s and early 1930s, Huxley would have been aware of what was going on with Stalin and the Soviet Union in Russia at that time. Given his pacifist beliefs, he would not have liked what was going on in the Soviet Union, Germany, or Spain.

Orwell's reasoning behind writing 1984 is less difficult to interpret. Given his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and experiences with fighting totalitarian regime in that setting, his disdain for this type of government is not easy to understand. Orwell's 1984 was a direct depiction of his fear for the future of the world if taken over by fascism.