This is an unabridged version, 86MB, running for 6.3 hours.

Encoded as 32kbps 22050Hz MP3 mono - radio quality

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Summary

Brave New World is one of the most influential and powerful novels written in the
twentieth century. It is one of the best known "dystopian" (implying "nightmare
world") fictions alongside H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Huxley imagines a future world where children are processed genetically in bottles
rather than conceived 'naturally', and belong to one of five classes according to
their intelligence: from perfect "Alphas" down to moronic "Epsilons". Learning
takes place by repetition teaching during sleep, but basically this consists of
enforcing certain behaviour patterns through suggestion. This is backed up by the
legal drug 'soma' that pacifies people through a false sense of fulfilment.

The story is that of an unhappy Alpha-Plus man called Bernard Marx who is unusual
for his genetic caste in being short and unorthodox in his ideas. He has fallen in
love with a girl called Lenina, who he takes to an island of 'savages' where he
meets a handsome young savage called John. This boy turns out to be the son of the
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning and Bernard manages to bring him back to
'civilization'. The story follows John as he is treated as a circus freak. John's
desire for Lenina that is ruined by his antiquated notions of love that derive
from Shakespeare. John becomes the focus of the novel as it leads towards its sad
conclusion.

This is as successful a cautionary tale now as it was at the time of its

publication in 1932, and is just as popular.

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Read by Peter Firth