109 Fun Facts About Brave New World

In Brave New World, what are the 'feelies'?

Films with touch effects: Lenina is thrilled by the one she takes John to see, but he is appalled by it.

The title Brave New World comes from a line in which play?

The Tempest: 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 Brave New World, alluding to Leibniz via Voltaire's Candide?

Le Meilleur des mondes: Leibniz meant 'the best of all possible worlds' in earnest, before Voltaire's Candide turned it into mockery.

Which 1954 Aldous Huxley book recounts his experiences of taking mescaline?

The Doors of Perception: Jim Morrison took his band's name, the Doors, from the book's title.

Huxley said Brave New World began as a parody of which H. G. Wells novel?

Men Like Gods: Huxley said he set out to poke fun at Wells but got carried away by his own ideas.

Why are lower castes conditioned to hate the countryside but love country sports?

So they consume more: country sports must need elaborate apparatus and trips out of town, because 'a love of nature keeps no factories busy'.

Helmholtz Watson can't stop laughing when John reads him parents bullying a daughter to marry, from which play?

Romeo and Juliet: a girl pleading with her parents strikes Helmholtz as so absurd that he bursts out laughing, and John angrily locks the book away.

Bokanovsky's Process is a technique for doing what?

Cloning up to 96 people from one egg: the Director boasts that one egg's identical twins can staff a whole small factory.

Which World State technique drums slogans like 'Everyone belongs to everyone else' into children by endless repetition?

Hypnopaedia: early attempts to teach children facts in their sleep failed, but whispered moral slogans became 'the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time'.

What is soma?

A happiness-inducing drug: back in London, Linda takes so much that her doctor expects it to stop her breathing within a month or two.

Where did Huxley get the name soma?

A Vedic ritual drink: the original soma was drunk in solemn religious rites, while the World State hands out soma as a daily ration.

Why are World State children brought into the Hospital for the Dying?

So they won't fear death: the best toys are kept there and they get chocolate cream on death days, so dying feels routine.

Before John discovers Shakespeare, what is the only book his mother Linda owns on the Reservation?

A manual for embryo workers: young John needs a quarter of an hour just to read its title, then throws it on the floor in tears.

What physical oddity marks out Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus misfit?

He is unusually short: lower castes are conditioned to link size with rank, so Bernard worries whether a Delta will show him the respect due an Alpha.

Where does the Director threaten to exile Bernard?

Iceland: Bernard swaggers out boasting of his defiance, then panics when he hears the Director is already seeking his replacement.

What is Lenina Crowne's job?

Foetus technician: students first meet her in the Embryo Store, inoculating future tropical workers against disease while they still have gills.

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

Malthusian belt: it's named for Thomas Malthus, who, ironically, urged moral restraint rather than contraception to check population growth.

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

New Mexico: Lenina, who has never seen anyone grow old, is horrified by the villagers' poverty, disease and old age.

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

Malpais: Linda was stranded there after getting lost on holiday, so John grew up in the pueblo but was never accepted by the villagers.

What does Mustapha Mond call the 'chief reason' Shakespeare is banned in the World State?

Because it's old: 'We haven't any use for old things here,' Mond says, and people too content to know passion wouldn't understand it anyway.

Who turns out to be John's father?

The Director of Hatcheries: when John kneels and calls him 'my father' in public, the room roars with laughter and he resigns in shame.

Why is John's parentage so scandalous in the World State?

Because it was procreative: sleeping around is normal, but child-bearing is so obscene that the word 'father' sets off hysterical laughter.

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

The Falklands: Mond calls such exile a reward, since the islands hold 'the most interesting set of men and women' anywhere.

What is Mustapha Mond's title?

World Controller for Western Europe: once a physicist whose research went too far, he chose to become a Controller rather than be exiled to an island.

In Mond's 'Cyprus experiment', what happens when an island is populated only with Alphas?

They fall into civil war: everyone schemes for the top jobs, and the few survivors beg to be governed again.

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

Stability: Mond calls it 'the primal and the ultimate need', worth giving up art, free science and religion to secure.

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

He claims the right to be unhappy, and with it the right to grow old, catch typhoid and live in fear of tomorrow: 'I claim them all.'

Where does John retreat to live as a hermit at the end of Brave New World?

A lighthouse near Puttenham: he whips himself there, and once a hidden filmmaker's footage is released, crowds of sightseers descend.

How does Brave New World end for John?

He hangs himself: ashamed of joining the crowd's orgy the night before, he is found by the first sightseers to arrive that evening.

Why does Fanny Crowne share Lenina's last name?

Only ten thousand surnames are in use among two billion people; Lenina's namesake Fanny scolds her for seeing only Henry for four months.

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

Utopian socialism: Mises wrote that 'the public was delighted', yet Huxley's readers 'rushed nonetheless to apply for jobs with the government'.

Which European country banned Brave New World in 1932, the year it was published?

Ireland: US schools have since challenged it too, one complaint being that it 'centered around negative activity'.

Which philosopher called Brave New World 'merely an expansion' of two chapters of his 1931 book The Scientific Outlook?

Bertrand Russell: yet in his published review he held his tongue, praising Huxley's 'usual masterly skill'.

Which media scholar's 1985 book argued that 'Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us'?

Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death argues that television turns news and politics into entertainment, lulling viewers the way Huxley foresaw.

Which Russian novel did a 1946 review say Brave New World must partly derive from?

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin: kept from publication in Soviet Russia, it first came out in English, in the United States.

In Brave New World Revisited, what did Huxley conclude about his 1931 prophecies?

Coming true sooner than he thought: 'much sooner than I thought they would', he wrote, pointing to overpopulation, propaganda and drugs.

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

Pala: journalist Will Farnaby lands there working for oil interests, then comes to see it as the ideal society just as his oil deal helps doom it.

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

George Orwell: in 1949 Huxley wrote to his old pupil praising Nineteen Eighty-Four, yet predicting a future more like Brave New World.

Bernard wants a quiet walk and talk on his first date with Lenina, but where does she take him instead?

A women's wrestling match: Bernard sulks in the crowd all afternoon and says he'd rather be 'myself and nasty' than somebody else, however jolly.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley: besides championing evolution, he coined the word 'agnostic', supposedly in 1869, from the Greek for 'unknown'.

Which two famous people died on the same day as Aldous Huxley?

John F. Kennedy and C. S. Lewis: at Huxley's own request, his wife Laura injected him with LSD hours before he died.

In 1945 Walt Disney hired Huxley to script which classic, though his version was never used?

Alice in Wonderland: Huxley's script wove in the life of the story's author, and Disney made its own version without it.

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

Leonard Nimoy: the TV film trades the novel's bleak finale for a happy ending in which Bernard, played by Peter Gallagher, escapes with Lenina.

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

Peacock: developed first for Syfy and then ordered by USA Network, it moved to the new streamer for its launch and was cancelled after one season.

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

Bruce Dickinson came back with guitarist Adrian Smith, but Janick Gers stayed on, so the band recorded with three guitarists.

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

Crome Yellow: its character Mr Scogan predicts babies raised in 'vast state incubators', so that 'the family system will disappear'.

CBS's two-part 1956 Brave New World, narrated by Aldous Huxley himself, was made for which medium?

Radio: it opened CBS's revived experimental Workshop, and CBS Radio's vice president reasoned, 'We'll never get a sponsor anyway, so we might as well try anything.'

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

Demolition Man: Sandra Bullock's officer is named Lenina Huxley, after the novel's Lenina Crowne and its author.

Who brings Linda the copy of Shakespeare that John reads on the Reservation?

Popé: Linda's lover, he also brings her mescal, and young John, stirred by a line of Shakespeare, tries to stab him but fails.

An eye disease that almost blinded Aldous Huxley as a teenager ended his hopes of which career?

Medicine: he could still read, though with difficulty, and went on to study English literature at Oxford instead.

Most World State women are sterile 'freemartins'; what makes them so before decanting?

Male sex hormone: Mr. Foster says the doses leave them 'guaranteed sterile', with just 'the slightest tendency to grow beards'.

What gets Helmholtz Watson reported to his college's Principal?

Reading students a poem about solitude: the outcry leaves him 'a marked man', yet he feels he's just beginning to have something to write about.

According to gossip, what did a Hatchery mistake put into Bernard Marx's blood-surrogate before decanting?

Alcohol: Fanny says a worker mistook him for a Gamma embryo and dosed him, but Lenina dismisses the rumour as 'nonsense'.

Which thinker's name replaces 'Our Ford' whenever psychological matters come up in the World State?

Sigmund Freud: as 'Our Freud', he is credited with first revealing 'the appalling dangers of family life'.

When John disrupts a handout to Delta workers at London's Hospital for the Dying, what does Helmholtz Watson do?

Joins the fight: Helmholtz cries 'Men at last!' and starts punching, while Bernard holds back, too scared to help.

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

Mitsima: yet when the village boys go down into the kiva to become men, John is driven away with stones.

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

Classic British science fiction: Royal Mail timed the six stamps to mark 75 years since H. G. Wells died and 70 since The Day of the Triffids appeared.

Why won't Mustapha Mond let John go into island exile with his friends?

He wants to see what becomes of John: John swears he won't go on being 'experimented with' and runs away to live alone.

After John becomes a London celebrity, how does high society treat his mother Linda?

Nobody wants to see her: they find her ugly, but Linda doesn't care, since soma was her main reason for coming back.

Unable to speak on his deathbed, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley wrote his wife a note requesting which drug?

LSD was his last request, and his wife Laura gave him two injections of it in his final hours. She later described the scene in her memoir This Timeless Moment.

Where a Christian would make the sign of the cross, devout Brave New World citizens sign which letter instead?

The T stands for the Model T, the car whose assembly line the World State treats as holy. Every old cross had its top cut off so only the letter remained.

Trying to purge himself of civilisation at his hilltop retreat in Brave New World, John punishes his body with what?

A knotted whip is his tool of penance, and once word gets out it turns the hermit into a spectacle. Sightseers soon fly in demanding a repeat performance.

Which American novelist admitted lifting the plot of Brave New World for his own debut novel, Player Piano?

Kurt Vonnegut said so cheerfully in an interview, adding that Huxley had borrowed the plot in turn from an earlier book. Player Piano imagines an America where machines have made most workers redundant.

As a Hollywood screenwriter, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley co-wrote MGM's 1940 film of which classic novel?

Pride and Prejudice starred Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, with Huxley sharing the script credit with Jane Murfin. The pair worked from a stage version as well as the book.

In Brave New World, after Linda and John publicly embarrass the Director before his Hatchery staff, what becomes of him?

He resigns in disgrace and never returns to the Centre, which spares Bernard the punishment the Director had just announced. Bernard had brought the pair to London for exactly that purpose.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in just four months of 1931 while living in a seaside town in which country?

France was home at the time: he drafted the novel at Sanary-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean between May and August. He began it as a light parody and got carried away by his own ideas.

After a feely date with Lenina in Brave New World, John goes home alone to read which Shakespeare tragedy?

Othello springs to his mind because the feely's lead is a Black man who carries off a blonde woman. John finds the film shameful and leaves a baffled Lenina on her roof.

In Brave New World, which profession gives Bernard Marx his inside view of how citizens' minds are moulded?

A psychologist by trade, he knows exactly how many whispered repetitions built each of his friends' opinions. That knowledge makes their cheerful slogans impossible for him to enjoy.

In Brave New World, Helmholtz Watson lectures at a London college devoted to which invented subject?

Emotional Engineering is the craft of writing slogans and feely scripts that steer how people feel. Helmholtz excels at it and is bored, sensing he could write something that matters.

Mustapha Mond admits in Brave New World that he once risked exile for forbidden research in which science?

Physics was his passion, and his private experiments went too far for the authorities. Offered an island or a seat among the rulers, he chose power and still misses the science.

Debating God with the Savage in Brave New World, Mustapha Mond reads aloud from which Victorian churchman?

Cardinal Newman argued that nobody is truly their own master and that independence fails people in the end. Mond replies that his citizens stay young and prosperous until they die, so they can do without God.

The Reservation ritual that Lenina and Bernard watch in Brave New World honours Jesus and which other god?

Pookong shares the villagers' prayers with Christ, and both are offered the blood of a young man beaten as he circles a heap of snakes. John longs to take the boy's place and is refused.

Cut off from soma on the Reservation in Brave New World, Linda dulls her misery with which drink?

Mescal leaves her sick the next morning, a poor stand-in for the soma she craves. Back in London she takes soma almost without pause until it kills her.

John's hermit retreat in Brave New World stands in which English county, where Aldous Huxley himself was born?

Surrey is the setting, a few miles from Godalming, where Huxley was born in 1894. He sent his Savage to die in the countryside of his own childhood.

How does Bernard Marx react in Brave New World when Mustapha Mond sentences him to an island?

He begs to stay, grovelling and blaming his two friends until he has to be carried out and sedated. Mond then reveals that the islands are no punishment at all.

When John turns violent after Lenina undresses for him in Brave New World, where does she lock herself?

In the bathroom she waits, bewildered, while John paces outside raging in borrowed verse. A phone call telling him Linda is dying sends him running and lets her slip away.

Brave New World author Aldous Huxley moved to which American city in 1937 and lived there until he died?

Los Angeles meant Hollywood, where he earned a rich living as a studio screenwriter. A friend recalled that he spent much of it helping refugees escape Hitler's Germany.

Touring the Reservation in Brave New World, Lenina is revolted to see mothers doing what with their babies?

Nursing them at the breast is something no one in her world has seen, since babies there come from bottles. Bernard shocks her further by wondering aloud what she has missed.

Why do the pueblo men in Brave New World refuse to let John take part in their sacred rituals?

His pale skin marks him as an outsider, so he is driven off with stones on the night the other boys are initiated. He walks into the desert alone and stages an ordeal of his own.

What does John do with the soma ration meant for Delta workers at the hospital in Brave New World?

He throws it out a window by the handful, shouting that he is setting the workers free. They riot over the lost pills instead of thanking him.

What does John insist must come first when Lenina offers herself to him in Brave New World?

Marriage vows are his condition, and he backs them with Shakespeare's warnings about patience before the wedding night. Lenina, raised to find such promises absurd, simply starts to undress.

Which Hollywood star played John's mother Linda in the 2020 television series of Brave New World?

Demi Moore took the part as a recurring guest, opposite Alden Ehrenreich as her son. The series was cancelled after one season.

Defending the caste system in Brave New World, Mustapha Mond says the ideal population is modelled on what?

An iceberg is his model: eight-ninths of the people below the waterline and one-ninth above. Those below are the happier, he argues, because their work asks nothing they cannot give.

Which country banned Brave New World in 1967, with Aldous Huxley denounced there as a pornographer?

India acted four years after he died, an odd fate for a writer who had spent decades championing Indian philosophy.

Which American publisher's 1998 list of the century's best English-language novels ranked Brave New World fifth?

Modern Library's board put it fifth, while British readers voting in the BBC's Big Read five years later ranked it 87th.

How does John greet the first reporter who lands beside his retreat near the end of Brave New World?

With a hard kick to the tailbone, so fierce that the man cannot sit comfortably afterwards. Later arrivals get the same welcome and soon keep their distance.

Why is Mustapha Mond free to read the Shakespeare that Brave New World forbids everyone else?

He makes the rules, so he may break them, as he tells an astonished John. He knows the old books well enough to trade lines with the Savage from memory.

Where does Mustapha Mond keep the Bible and other forbidden religious books in Brave New World?

In a safe in his study, alongside The Imitation of Christ and a volume of William James. He takes them out to show John that he knows exactly what his world has given up.

In Brave New World, lovesick Lenina forgets one embryo's injection, dooming a future official to die of what?

Sleeping sickness kills him more than twenty-two years later at an African posting, the first case in half a century. Lenina was daydreaming about John at the time.

Before the feely starts in Brave New World, which instrument plays Lenina and John a concert of smells?

A scent organ opens the show, playing a recital of aromas the way a musician plays notes. The feely that follows disgusts John.

Mustapha Mond's first name in Brave New World honours the founding president of which republic?

Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was turning an old empire into a new nation while Huxley wrote. The family name comes from Sir Alfred Mond, a British industrialist.

Why does Bernard Marx's grand party for London's elite end in humiliation in Brave New World?

John won't come out of his room, so the guests who came only to stare at him turn on their host. Bernard's borrowed fame collapses in one evening.

Which biologist's essay Daedalus, picturing babies grown outside the womb, is thought to have fed Brave New World?

J. B. S. Haldane first gave it as a lecture to a Cambridge club in 1923, imagining humans steering their own evolution. Huxley's novel carries the essay's laboratory births to their extreme.

In Brave New World, the highest compliment a man can pay a woman such as Lenina is to call her what?

Pneumatic is the word her lover uses when recommending her to a colleague. John cannot accept her on those terms, which wrecks any hope of romance between them.

In Brave New World, monthly Violent Passion Surrogate treatments flood each citizen's body with which hormone?

Adrenaline gives them every bodily effect of terror and rage without any of the danger. Mond offers it as proof that his world has no need of real tragedy or heroism.

In chapter 1 of Brave New World, lower-caste embryos are kept below par by starving them of what?

Oxygen is rationed bottle by bottle, and the less an embryo gets, the lower its caste will be. An Epsilon, the tour group is told, has no need of human intelligence.

In chapter 1 of Brave New World, embryos destined to repair rockets in mid-air are trained to feel happiest how?

Upside down is how they will have to work, so their bottles are kept turning until being head-first feels like comfort. The Hatchery's aim is to make people love the fate chosen for them.

In chapter 2 of Brave New World, sirens and painful shocks teach Delta babies to hate books and what else?

Flowers and picture books are laid out to tempt the crawling babies, then the alarms and shocks begin. The Director says two hundred repetitions will make the dislike permanent.

In chapter 2 of Brave New World, young Reuben wakes reciting an English broadcast, though he speaks only which language?

Polish is all he knows, yet he repeats the talk word for word, and a doctor called by his baffled parents recognises it. The accident became the basis of every child's night-time lessons.

In chapter 3 of Brave New World, Fanny scolds Lenina for seeing only which man for four months?

Henry Foster has been her only partner all that time, which Fanny thinks close to scandalous. Lenina agrees to be more promiscuous and mentions that Bernard has asked her out.

In chapter 4 of Brave New World, Lenina flies off with her lover for an afternoon of which sport?

Obstacle Golf at Stoke Poges fills their afternoon, while Bernard is left alone and miserable on the roof. She had just accepted his own invitation in front of a crowded lift.

In chapter 5 of Brave New World, which great London church has become a cabaret full of sexophones?

Westminster Abbey now hosts Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists, and Lenina dances there in a soma haze. The coronation church has become a nightclub.

Flying home from a date in chapter 6 of Brave New World, Bernard upsets Lenina by hovering to gaze at what?

A rough sea at night strikes him as beautiful because it makes him feel like himself and not a cell in the social body. Lenina calls the view horrible and wants only to get away.

In chapter 6 of Brave New World, the Warden tells Bernard and Lenina that the Reservation is ringed by what?

An electric fence rings the whole territory, and the Warden boasts that no one born inside has ever got out. Lenina, bored by his lecture, quietly swallows soma.

In chapter 6 of Brave New World, the Director recalls losing a girl on the Reservation years ago during what?

A sudden storm struck while they were out on an excursion, and she was never found. Embarrassed at having confided this, he rounds on Bernard with threats.

At the Reservation in chapter 6 of Brave New World, Bernard remembers he has left what running at home?

A perfume tap pouring out eau de Cologne is costing him a fortune by the minute. When he phones a friend to turn it off, he learns his boss means to banish him.

At the Solidarity Service in chapter 5 of Brave New World, what about Morgana Rothschild distracts Bernard?

Her single eyebrow holds his gaze so completely that he cannot lose himself in the ceremony. While the others melt into the group, he only pretends to share their ecstasy.

Through his mother Julia, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley was the great-nephew of which Victorian poet?

Matthew Arnold was her uncle, and her sister was the best-selling novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. Julia herself founded a girls' school, Prior's Field.

Before leaving London for good in Brave New World, John purges himself by drinking warm water mixed with what?

Mustard and warm water make him vomit, a cure for poisoning that he learned in the pueblo. The poison, he tells his friends, was civilisation itself.