Brave New World

1932 (published) ; Aldous Huxley

Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931, and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

In 1999 the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at No. 5 on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century. In 2003 Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at No. 53 in “the Top 100 Greatest Novels of All Time,” and the novel was listed at No. 87 on "The Big Read Survey" by the BBC. Despite these accolades Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 Banned and Challenged Books of the Decade since the association began the list in 1990.