Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World as his prediction of what the future may hold. He used well rounded characters to tell the story of a world in which almost every aspect of life was controlled. The settings of the book were very detailed and intricate, from the factory where new members of society were made to the deserts of the Savage reserves. The futuristic characteristics of the society were also very intriguing. These included the different castes of people, from Alpha to Epsilon, the helicopter transportation systems, and the drug soma, which offered escape for distressed members of society. Huxley's opinions on personal freedoms were very evident in the novel. He seemed to feel that governments were on a path that would lead to the destruction of personal liberties under the ideal of "happiness." The novel suggests that government only desires complete control of its own citizens and it will try to gain this control through any means necessary, including taking away the natural right of birthing and parenting a child. Huxley may have acquired this view of government watching the Nazi fascist machine come to power in the early 1930's. At the end of his novel, one of the main characters commits suicide because of the pressures of "civilized" life. Aldous Huxley may have been trying to communicate that if a government ascertains the amount of control it did during the novel, modern ways would perish and all traces of the past erased by the new regime. Brave New World serves as a commentary to what would become if a world government successfully gained an unimaginable amount of control and changed life as we know it.
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