Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and one of the
most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United
States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-
ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and
scripts.

Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as
parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some
academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank. [1] He was also well
known for advocating and taking Mescaline, including on his death bed.

Biography

Early years

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and
professional herbalist Leonard Huxley and first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior's Field School and
also the niece of Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. He was grandson of Thomas
Henry Huxley, one of the most prominent English naturalists of the 19th century, a man known as
"Darwin's Bulldog." His brother Julian Huxley was also a noted biologist.

Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then continued in a school
named Hillside. His teacher was his mother who supervised him for several years until she became
terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908, when he
was fourteen. Three years later he suffered an illness (keratitis punctata) which "left [him] practically
blind for two to three years".[2] Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in World War I.
Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College,
Oxford. He graduated in 1916 with First Class Honours.

Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a
living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name George
Orwell) was among his pupils, but was remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher
who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. [3] For
a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry. But never desiring a
career in administration (or in business), Huxley's lack of inherited means propelled him into applied
literary work.

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in
his early twenties. His earlier work includes important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific
progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza). In
Brave New World Huxley portrays a society operating on the principles of mass production and
Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a
character in Eyeless in Gaza.

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Middle years

During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline
Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including D.H. Lawrence,
Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle.
In 1919 he married Maria Nijs, a Belgian woman he had met at Garsington. They had one child,
Matthew Huxley (1920 – 2005), who had a career as an epidemiologist. The family lived in Italy part of
the time in the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death
in 1930, he edited his letters (1933).

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald
Heard. At this time Huxley wrote Ends and Means, while living in Taos, New Mexico; in this work he
explores the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of
'liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love', they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it. Heard
introduced Huxley to Vedanta, meditation and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938
Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also became a Vedantist in
the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after,
Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which
discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.

Aldous Huxley was close friends with Occidental College president Remsen Bird during Huxley's time
living in Southern California. He spent much time at the college, which is located in the Eagle Rock
neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the college is portrayed under the name of Tarzana College in his
satircal novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), for which he collected that year's James Tait
Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.

During this period he was also able to tap into some Hollywood income using his writing skills, thanks
to an introduction into the business by his friend Anita Loos, the prolific novelist and screenwriter. He
received screen credit for Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a number of other
films. However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he wrote a synopsis of Alice in
Wonderland, Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only understand every third word".
Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable for the movie moguls, who
demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all else.

For most of his life since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, his eyesight was poor
(despite the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). Around 1939, Huxley
encountered the Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher (Margaret Corbett) who was able to
teach him in the method. In 1940, relocating from Hollywood to a forty-acre ranchito in the high desert
hamlet of Llano, California, in northernmost Los Angeles County, Huxley claimed his sight improved
dramatically as a result of using the Bates Method, particularly utilizing the extreme and pure natural
lighting of the Southwestern American desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was
able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried driving a car along the dirt road beside the
ranch. He wrote a book about his successes with the Bates Method, The Art of Seeing which was
published in 1942 (US), 1943 (UK).

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However, while Huxley undoubtedly believed his vision had improved, other evidence suggests that
Huxley may have been fooling himself. In 1952, Bennett Cerf was reportedly present when Huxley
spoke at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from the lectern
without difficulty:

"Then suddenly he faltered — and the truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address — he
had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought it closer and closer to his eyes. When
it was only an inch away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his
pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonizing moment." [4] (p241: quotes Bennett
Cerf re Huxley's vision in 1952)

On October 21, 1949 Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating
Orwell on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is". His letter to Orwell contained the
prediction that: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and
prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving
their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience".[5]

Post-war

After World War II Huxley applied for United States citizenship, but was denied because he would not
say he would take up arms to defend America. Nevertheless he remained in the United States and in
1959 he turned down an offer of a Knight Bachelor by the Macmillan government. During the 1950s,
Huxley's interest in the field of psychical research grew keener and his later works are strongly
influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with the psychedelic drugs.

In October 1930, the Mystic Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours
persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion. He was introduced to mescaline by
the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953; on December 24, 1955, Huxley took his first dosage of LSD.
Indeed Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment",
famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying. His psychedelic drug experiences are
described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in the book The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake) and Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on
psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies. While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a
friend of Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller's biography of Bradbury, the latter was dissatisfied
with Huxley, especially after Huxley encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugs.

In 1955 Huxley's wife, Maria, died of breast cancer. In 1956 he married Laura Archera (1911-2007),
also an author. She wrote a biography of Huxley. In 1960, Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer
and, in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island, and
gave lectures on "Banana Potentialities" at the Esalen institute which were foundational to the forming
of the Human Potential Movement. On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to
his wife for "LSD, 1 gram, i.m.". According to her account of his death (in her book This Timeless
Moment), she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died at 5:21
pm on November 22, 1963, aged 69. Media coverage of his death was overshadowed by news of the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of the

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Irish author C. S. Lewis. Huxley's ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery,
Compton, Guildford, Surrey, England.

Huxley's only child, Matthew Huxley (d. February 10, 2005) was also an author, as well as an educator,
anthropologist and prominent epidemiologist. His work ranged from promoting universal health care to
establishing standards of care for nursing home patients and the mentally ill to investigating the question
of what is a socially sanctionable drug. [6] Matthew's first marriage, to documentary filmmaker Ellen
Hovde, ended in divorce. His second wife died in 1983. He was survived by his third wife, Franziska
Reed Huxley; and two children from his first marriage, Trevenen Huxley and Tessa Huxley.

Literary themes

Crome Yellow (1921) attacks Victorian and Edwardian social principles which led to World War I and
its terrible aftermath. Together with Huxley's second novel, Antic Hay (1923), the book expresses much
of the mood of disenchantment of the early 1920s. It was intended to reflect, as Huxley stated in a letter
to his father, "the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the
standards, conventions and values current in the present epoch."

Huxley's reputation for iconoclasm and emancipation grew. He was condemned for his explicit
discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction. Antic Hay, for example, was burned in Cairo and in the
years that followed many of Huxley's books were received with disapproval or banned at one time or
another. Following the exclusion of Brave New World, Point Counter Point and even Island from Time
magazine's list of 'All-Time 100 Novels' there was uproar. One critic became particularly incensed,
proclaiming such a decision to be "blasphemous".

Huxley, however, said that a novel should be full of interesting opinions and arresting ideas, describing
his aim as a novelist as being 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay'; and
with Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley wrote his first true 'novel of ideas', the type of thought-
provoking fiction with which he is now associated.

One of his main ideas was pessimism about the cultural future of society, a pessimism which sprang
largely from his visit to the United States between September 1925 and June 1926. He recounted his
experiences in Jesting Pilate (1926): 'The thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of
values, a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards', and it was soon after this visit that
he conceived the idea of writing a satire of what he had encountered.".[7]

A widespread fear of Americanization had already existed in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century
and Brave New World (1932) as well as Island (1962) form the cornerstone of Huxley's damning
indictment of American commercialism. Brave New World (as well as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
and Yevgeni Zamyatin's We) helped form the anti-utopian or dystopian tradition in literature and has
become synonymous with a future world in which the human spirit is subject to conditioning and
control. Island acts as an antonym to Brave New World; it is described as "one of the truly great
philosophical novels". [8]

He devoted his time at his small house at Llano in the Mojave Desert to a life of contemplation,
mysticism and experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs. His suggestions in The Doors of Perception

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(1954) that mescalin and lysergic acid were 'drugs of unique distinction' which should be exploited for
the 'supernaturally brilliant' visionary experience they offered provoked even more outrage than his
passionate defense of the Bates method in The Art of Seeing (1942). However, the book went on to
become a cult text in the psychedelic 1960s, and Huxley appears on the sleeve of the Beatles' landmark
1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Awards

In 1959 Aldous Huxley received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for the
Novel.

Films

Notable works include the original screenplay for Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland (which was
rejected because it was too literary[9]), two productions of Brave New World, one of Point Counter Point,
one of Eyeless in Gaza, and one of Ape and Essence. He was one of the screenwriters for Pride and
Prejudice (1940), co-authored the screenplay for Jane Eyre (1944) with John Houseman, and worked on
the screenplay of Madame Curie (1943) without credit.

Director Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, starring Vanessa Redgrave, was adapted from Huxley's
The Devils of Loudun. A made-for-television adaptation of Brave New World was made in 1990.

Quotations

Aldous Huxley
 On truth: "Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion
much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations."
 On psychological totalitarianism [1] (1959): "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there
will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their
servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that
people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they
will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing
enhanced by pharmacological methods."
 On social organizations: "One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of
human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are
forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the
victims of their home-made monsters."
 On heroin [2]: "Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man
who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months
in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time."
 On words: "Words form the thread on which we string our experiences."
 On experience: "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what
happens to him." – Texts and Pretexts, 1932
 On chastity: "The most unnatural of the sexual perversions."

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  After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.- Music at Night,
1931
 "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
 "Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages." Antic Hay,
1923
 "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the
lessons that History has to teach."
 "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
 "Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial - but democracy and
freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense." - Brave New World Revisited
 On religion: "You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of
magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the
same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by
abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves
with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite
intelligent enough." - Point Counter Point
 "There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving."

Bibliography

Novels
 Crome Yellow (1921)
 Antic Hay (1923)
 Those Barren Leaves (1925)
 Point Counter Point (1928)
 Brave New World (1932)
 Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
 After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)
 Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
 Ape and Essence (1948)
 The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
 Island (1962)

Short stories
 Limbo (1920)
 Mortal Coils (1922)
 Little Mexican (U.S. - Young Archimedes) (1924)
 Two or Three Graces (1926)
 Brief Candles (1930)
 Jacob's Hands; A Fable (Late 1930s)
 Collected Short Stories (1957)

Poetry
 The Burning Wheel (1916)

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  Jonah (1917)
 The Defeat of Youth (1918)
 Leda (1920)
 Arabia Infelix (1929)
 The Cicadas (1931)
 First Philosopher's Song

Travel writing
 Along The Road (1925)
 Jesting Pilate (1926) The author recounts his experiences travelling through six countries,
offering his observations on their people, cultures and customs.
 Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)

Drama
 Mortal Coils - A Play
 The World of Light
 The Discovery, Adapted from Francis Sheridan

Essay collections
 On the Margin (1923)
 Along the Road (1925)
 Essays New and Old (1926)
 Proper Studies (1927)
 Do What You Will (1929)
 Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
 Music at Night (1931)
 Texts and Pretexts (1932)
 The Olive Tree (1936)
 Words and their Meanings (1940)
 The Art of Seeing (1942)
 The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
 Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
 Themes and Variations (1950)
 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
 The Doors of Perception (1954)
 Heaven and Hell (1956)
 Adonis and the Alphabet (1956)
 Collected Essays (1958)
 Brave New World Revisited (1958)
 Literature and Science (1963)

Philosophy
 Ends and Means (1937)
 The Perennial Philosophy (1944) (ISBN 0-06-057058-X)

Biography and nonfiction

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  The Devils of Loudun (1953) (ISBN 0-78670-368-7)
 Grey Eminence (1941) (ISBN 0-70110-802-9)
 Selected Letters (2007) (ISBN 1-56663-629-9)

Children's literature
 The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
 The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)

Collections
 Texts and Pretexts (1933)
 Collected Short Stories (1957)
 Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
 The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)

Point Counter Point

Consistent with Huxley's other novels; Point Counter Point has no overarching plot. Much of the novel
consists of deeply penetrating personality sketches and long intellectual conversations. When actions are
described, Huxley analyzes every motive and internal emotion in detail, sometimes even jumping into a
character's past to provide context. His characters decry the dangers of sacrificing humanity for
intellectualism, and express concern about the staggering progress of science and technology.

Comparisons have been made between the character Everard Webley and his Brotherhood of British
Freemen and Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. However, because Mosley was still
prominent member of the Labour Party at the time of the publication of Point Counter Point in 1928 and
would remain so until 1931 it is highly unlikely that Huxley had him in mind. A number of other fascist
groups preceded Mosley's BUF (founded in 1932), the most prominent of which was the British
Fascists. Possibly one of these may have been Huxley's inspiration.

Synopsis and characters

Set in 1920s London, the novel begins by detailing the misery of one Walter Bidlake, but quickly
expands its reach through Walter's social sphere, which is a mix of British nobility and lower-class
intellectuals. Walter's affair with Marjorie, a married woman, has gone sour, and he is off to a party at
Tantamount House to doggedly chase Lucy Tantamount, a woman he finds logically abhorrent but
irrationally attractive. Following Lucy to a restaurant, they meet up with Mark Rampion and Maurice
Spandrell, intellectuals.

Meanwhile, Walter's sister Elinor is returning from India with her husband Philip. Their relationship is
not going well: Philip lives in a world of intellectualism, and is uncomfortable with his humanity so far
as to suppress it.

Back in London, Walter tries to ask his boss at a literary magazine for a raise. The man, Denis Burlap, is
a facetious and hypocritical individual who idolizes (and thinks himself like) St. Francis.

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All the while, the charismatic Everard Webley is building up his Brotherhood of British Freemen, a
group with decidedly fascist politics.

Brave New World

Brave New World is a 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley. Set in London in 2540 AD, the novel anticipates
developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to
change society. Huxley answers this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited
(1958), and with his final work, a novel titled Island (1962), both summarized below.

Summary

The world the novel describes is a utopia, albeit an ironic one: humanity is carefree, healthy and
technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently
happy due to government-provided stimulation. The irony is that all of these things have been achieved
by eliminating many things that humans consider to be central to their identity — family, culture, art,
literature, science, religion (other than idolization of "our Ford", Henry Ford, who is seen as the father of
their society), and philosophy. It is also a hedonistic society, deriving pleasure from promiscuous sex
and drug use, especially soma, a powerful psychotropic taken to escape pain and bad memories through
hallucinatory fantasies. Additionally, stability has been achieved and is maintained via deliberately
engineered and rigidly enforced social stratification.

Brave New World is Huxley's most famous novel. The ironic title comes from Miranda's speech in
Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world
That hath such people in't!"

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 while he was living in France and England (a British
writer, he moved to California in 1937). By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer
and social satirist. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, had published a collection
of his poetry (The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four successful satirical novels: Crome Yellow in 1921,
Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925 and Point Counter Point in 1928. Brave New World
was Huxley's fifth novel and first attempt at a utopian work.

Brave New World was inspired by the H.G. Wells utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells's optimistic
vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave
New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide
a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia" (see
dystopia), somewhat influenced by Wells's own The Sleeper Awakes and the works of D.H. Lawrence.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, completed ten years before in 1921, has been suggested as an influence,
but Huxley stated that he had not known of the book at the time.[1]

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Huxley visited the newly-opened and technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond plant, part of
Imperial Chemical Industries, or ICI, Billingham and gives a fine and detailed account of the processes
he saw. The introduction to the most recent print of Brave New World states that Huxley was inspired to
write the classic novel by this Billingham visit.[citation needed]

Although the novel is set in the future, it contains contemporary issues of the early 20th century. The
Industrial Revolution was bringing about massive changes to the world. Mass production had made cars,
telephones and radios relatively cheap and widely available throughout the developed world. The
Russian Revolution of 1917 and the first World War (1914–1918) were resonating throughout the world.

Huxley was able to use the setting and characters from his futuristic fantasy to express widely held
opinions, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early
trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Not only was Huxley outraged by
the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness and inward-looking nature of many Americans, [2] he also
found a book by Henry Ford on the boat to America. There was a fear of Americanisation in Europe, so
to see America firsthand, as well as read the ideas and plans of one of its foremost citizens, spurred
Huxley to write Brave New World with America in mind. The "feelies" are his response to the "talkie"
motion pictures, and the sex-hormone chewing gum is parody of the ubiquitous chewing gum, which
was something of a symbol of America at that time. In an article in the May 4, 1935 issue of Illustrated
London News, G. K. Chesterton explained that Huxley was revolting against the "Age of Utopias" - a
time, mostly before World War I, inspired by what H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were writing
about socialism and a World State.

“ After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the
Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made
capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say
blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian
righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that optimism has driven people into
pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness,
and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It
was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World
is more of a revolt against Utopia than against Victoria. ”

Brave New World received nearly universal criticism from contemporary critics, although his work was
later embraced. Even the few sympathetics tended to temper their praises with disparaging remarks. [3]

Characters

In order of appearance

 Thomas "Tomakin", Alpha, Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) for London; later
revealed to be the father of John the Savage.
 Henry Foster, Alpha, Administrator at the Hatchery and Lenina's current partner.

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  Lenina Crowne, Beta-Minus, Vaccination-worker at the Hatchery; loved by John the Savage.
 Mustapha Mond, Alpha-Plus, World Controller for Western Europe.
 Assistant Director of Predestination.
 Bernard Marx, Alpha-Plus, psychologist.
 Fanny Crowne, Beta, embryo worker; a friend of Lenina.
 Benito Hoover, Alpha, friend of Lenina; disliked by Bernard.
 Helmholtz Watson, Alpha-Plus, lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of
Writing), friend and confidant of Bernard Marx and John the Savage.

At the Solidarity Service

 Morgana Rothschild, Herbert Bakunin, Fifi Bradlaugh, Jim Bokanovsky, Clara Deterding,
Joanna Diesel, Sarojini Engels, and "that great lout" Tom Kawaguchi.
 Miss Keate, headmistress of the high-tech glass and concrete Eton College.
 Arch-Community Songster, a quasi-religious figure based in Canterbury.
 Primo Mellon, a reporter for the upper-caste news-sheet Hourly Radio, who attempts to
interview John the Savage and gets assaulted for his troubles.
 Darwin Bonaparte, a paparazzo who brings worldwide attention to John's hermitage.

Of Malpais

 John the Savage ('Mr. Savage'), son of Linda and Thomas (Tomakin/The Director), an outcast in
both primitive and modern society.
 Linda, a Beta-Minus. John the Savage's mother, and Thomas's (Tomakin/The Director) long lost
lover. She is from England and was pregnant with John when she got lost from Thomas in a trip
to New Mexico. She is disliked both by savage people because of her "civilized" behaviour, and
by civilized people because she is fat and looks old.
 Popé, a native of Malpais. Although he reinforces the behavior that causes hatred for Linda in
Malpais by sleeping with her and bringing her alcohol, he still holds the traditional beliefs of his
tribe.

Background figures

These are fictional and factual characters who died before the events in this book, but are of note in the
novel:

 Henry Ford, who has become a messianic figure to The World State. "Our Ford" is used in place
of "Our Lord", as a credit to his invention of the assembly line.
 Sigmund Freud, "Our Freud" is sometimes said in place of "Our Ford" due to the link between
Freud's psychoanalysis and the conditioning of humans, and Freud's popularisation of the idea
that sexual activity is essential to human happiness and need not be open to procreation. It is also
strongly implied that citizens of the World State believe Freud and Ford to be the same person.
 H.G. Wells, "Dr. Wells", British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was an
incentive for Brave New World. "All's well that ends Wells" - wrote Huxley in his letters,
criticizing Wells for anthropological assumptions Huxley found unrealistic.
 Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose conditioning techniques are used to train infants.

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  William Shakespeare, whose banned works are quoted throughout the novel by John, "the
Savage". The plays quoted include Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear,
Measure for Measure and Othello. (See List of quotes from Shakespeare in Brave New World.)
Mustapha Mond also knows them.
 Thomas Malthus, whose name is used to describe the contraceptive techniques (Malthusian belt)
practised by women of the World State.
 Reuben Rabinovitch, the character in whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first
noted.

Sources of names and references

The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be traced to
political and cultural figures:

 Bernard Marx, from George Bernard Shaw, playwright, and Karl Marx, a German philosopher
and author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
 Lenina Crowne, from Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution.
 Fanny Crowne, from Fanny Kaplan, famous for an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin.
Ironically, in the novel, Lenina and Fanny are friends.
 Polly Trotsky, a minor character. From Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader.
 Benito Hoover, from Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy; and Herbert Hoover, then President of
the USA.
 Darwin Bonaparte, from Napoleon Bonaparte, the leader of the First French Empire, and Charles
Darwin, author of The Origin of Species.
 Herbert Bakunin, from Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian philosopher and anarchist.
 Mustapha Mond, from Mustapha Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic after World
War One, who pulled his country into modernisation and official secularism; and Alfred Mond,
charismatic British businessman and politician, the founder of Imperial Chemical Industries
corporation.
 Primo Mellon, from Miguel Primo de Rivera, prime minister and dictator of Spain (1923-1930),
and Thomas Mellon, banker.
 Sarojini Engels, from Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto along with Karl
Marx; and Sarojini Naidu, Indian politician.
 Miss Keate, the Eton headmistress, from nineteenth-century headmaster John Keate.
 Arch-Community Songster, a parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church's
decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception.
 Popé, from the Native American rebel who was responsible for the conflict now known as Popé's
rebellion

Synopsis

The novel begins in London in the "year of {{Ford Model T|our Ford]] 632" (AD 2540 in the Gregorian
Calendar). In this world, the vast majority of the population is unified as The World State. An eternally
peaceful, stable, plentiful society where everyone believes everyone is happy. In this society, natural
reproduction has been done away with and children are born and raised in Hatchery and Conditioning
Centres. Society is rigidly divided into five castes, which are carefully engineered by these centres. The

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castes are: the Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons (with each caste further split into Plus and
Minus members). Alphas and Betas are the top level of society: they make decisions, teach, and dictate
policy. Each Alpha or Beta is the product of one egg being fertilized and developing into one fetus in
artificial wombs located on an assembly line in Hatchery and Conditioning Centres. The other castes,
however, are not unique biologically but multiple clones of one fertilization.

All members of society are conditioned with the values that the World State idealizes. Children are
trained to identify by their caste, co-operate, copulate, to enjoy anything that is good for Society , and
hate anything that is bad for Society. Constant consumption is the bedrock of stability for the World
State and one thing everyone is encouraged to consume is the ubiquitous drug, soma. Soma is a mild
hallucinogen that makes it possible for everyone to be blissfully oblivious. It has no short-term side
effects and induces no hangover, however, long-term abuse leads to death by respiratory failure.

Heterosexual sex is also widely consumed. In The World State, sex is a social activity rather than a
means of reproduction and is encouraged from early childhood. Regular reproduction can occur, but is
viewed by society as unnatural and repugnant; the few women who could reproduce are conditioned to
take birth control. As a result, sexual competition and emotional, romantic relationships are obsolete.
Marriage is not only unnecessary, it is considered an antisocial dirty joke because, as the conditioning
voice repeats at night, "everyone belongs to everyone else". In World State society, natural birth or
pregnancy, is smut of the most vulgar kind. To call someone a mother or father is the lowest insult.

Spending time alone and reading are considered outrageous wastes of time. People are taught to
associate in groups and consume entertainment. Also, the World State tries to stop its citizens from
having thoughts that are different from the rest of Society.

In The World State, people typically die at age 61 having maintained good health and youthfulness their
whole life. Death isn't feared; children are conditioned to view hospitals as happy playgrounds. Since no
one has family, they have no ties to mourn.

All consumption is encouraged, no one waits long for anything they desire. Everyone gets everything
they are conditioned to want and is, therefore, happy. The caste system eliminates the need for
professional competitiveness, people are literally bred to do their jobs and want no other. There is no
competition within castes; each caste members receives the same food, housing, and soma rationing as
every other member of that caste. Everyone is happy now.

In order to grow closer with members of the same class, citizens must participate in a mock religious
services called Solidarity Services. There twelve people consume large quantities of soma and sing
hymns. As the ritual progresses, the participants lose their concept of individuality and become one
unified body. This is symbolized as at the climax of the the group breaks out into an orgy, where the
Arch-Community Songster sings orgie-porgie hymns.

In geographic areas that are non conducive to easy living and consumption, The World State allows well
controlled, securely contained groups of "savages" to live. (One such "Savage Reservation" is located in
the western desert of the United States.) On reservations, savages reproduce normally.

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In its first chapters, the novel describes life in the World State and introduces Lenina and Bernard.
Lenina, a Beta, is an average, beautiful, desired woman, while Bernard, a psychologist, is an outcast.
Although an Alpha, Bernard is shorter than average -- a quality shared by the lower castes. He also
defies social norms and secretly stews in a hatred of his equals. His work with sleep-teaching has led
him to realize that people's deepest values are really just repeated phrases. Courting disaster, he is vocal
about being different, once stating he dislikes soma because he'd "rather be himself, sad, than another
person, happy". However, Bernard's core values have been trained the same as everyone else so he
sometimes acts in ways that are contradictory to his belief system. Bernard's differences fuel rumors that
he was accidentally administered alcohol while incubated, a method used for creating lower intelligence
in Epsilons.

Lenina is reprimanded in the beginning of the novel because she is not promiscuous enough. Lenina is
both fascinated and disturbed by Bernard, and courts him to help her reputation. Bernard is obsessed
with her, attributing noble qualities and poetic potentials to her despite evidence otherwise.

Bernard's only friend is Helmholtz Watson, an Alpha-Plus lecturer at the College of Emotional
Engineering (Department of Writing). Helmholtz is also an outcast,but because he is too gifted and
handsome, unlike Bernard. Helmholtz, successful, charming, attractive, is drawn to Bernard as a
confidant: he can talk to Bernard about his desire to write poetry. Bernard likes Helmholtz because,
unlike anyone else, Helmholtz likes Bernard. He is also, Bernard realizes jealously, everything Bernard
will never be.

The reservation and the Savage (chapters 7–9)

Bernard, desperately wanting Lenina's attentions, tries to impress her by taking her on holiday to a
Savage Reservation. The huge reservation, located in New Mexico and surrounded by electric fences,
holds a society of Malpais, who live and reproduce in natural, unsanitized, conditions. From afar, Lenina
thinks it will be exciting. In person, she finds the aged, toothless natives who actually mend their clothes
rather than throw them away, repugnant, and spends most of the time on soma. Bernard, however, is
fascinated, although he realizes his seduction plans have failed.

In typical tourist fashion, Bernard and Lenina watch what at first appears to be a quaint native
ceremony. The village folk, who live similarly to Pueblo peoples such as the Hopi and Zuni, begin by
singing, but the ritual, which is a unique cross between a passion play and a human sacrifice, quickly
becomes one where a village boy is whipped to death.

Soon after, the couple encounters Linda, a woman formerly of The World State who had accidentally
been left behind years ago when she was brought here on a date not unlike the one Bernard and Lenina
are having. Impregnated and abandoned by the man who brought her here, she had given birth to a son,
John (later referred to as John the Savage) who is now eighteen.

Though conversations with Linda and John, we learn that their life has been hard. For eighteen years,
they have been treated as outsiders: Linda was hated for -- as she was conditioned to -- sleeping with all
the men of the village and John mistreated for his mother's actions. John's one island of joy was that his
mother had taught him to read although he only had two books: a scientific manual from his mother's
job and a collection of the works of Shakespeare (a work banned in The World State). John has been

14
denied the religious rituals of the village, although he has watched them and even has had some of his
own religious experiences in the desert.

Old, weathered, Linda wants desperately to return to London, she is tired of a life without soma. John
wants to see the "Brave New World" his mother has told him so much about. Bernard wants to take
them back for his own self-serving reasons. Bernard's boss, Thomas, has threatened to deport Bernard to
Iceland after the trip because Bernard does not play his role in Society. He arranges permission for
Linda and John to leave.

The Savage Visits The World State (chapters 10–15)

Upon his return to London, Bernard is confronted by the Director of the Hatchery and Conditioning
Centre who, in front of an audience of higher-caste Centre workers, denounces Bernard for his antisocial
behavior and threatens to send him to Iceland. Bernard, thinking that for the first time in his life he has
the upper hand, defends himself by presenting the Director with his lost lover and unknown son, Linda
and John. Because the concepts of parents and natural birth are anathema, the inexorably humiliated
Director resigns in shame.

Bernard's new pet savage makes him the toast of London. Pursued by the highest members of society,
able to bed any woman he fancies, Bernard revels in attention he once scorned. Everyone who is anyone,
it seems will endure Bernard to dine with the interesting, different, beautiful John. Even Lenina grows
unnaturally fond of the savage, while the savage falls increasingly, chastely, in love with her. Bernard,
intoxicated on attention, falls in love with himself. At last, he has won.

The victory, however,is short lived. Linda, decrepit, toothless, friendless, goes on permanent soma
holiday while John, appalled by this empty society, refuses to perform for one more of Bernard's parties.
With the savage show over, society quickly and cruelly drops Bernard. Alone, he turns to his one true
friend, only to see Helmholtz fall into a quick, easy camaraderie with John. Bernard is left an outcast yet
again as he watches the only two men he ever connected with find more of interest in each other than
they ever did in him. John and Helmholtz discuss writing and Shakespeare while Bernard is left to make
childish, uninformed comments from the sidelines. Neither Bernard or Helmholtz can really understand
Shakespeare because the passions and beliefs of the characters no longer exist.

John and Helmholtz's island of peace is brief. John grows increasingly frustrated by a society he finds
wicked and debase. While he is deeply in love with Lenina, he also hates her for her sexual advances
that revolt and shame him. Finally, John's mother succumbs to soma and dies alone in a hospital. She
does not recognize her own son, and wants to die without his interruptions. As she dies, a group of
children come in eating candy and having fun, as part of a conditioning treatment to take any
significance out of death. Maddeningly, his grief bewilders and revolts the hospital workers. Their cold
reaction to Linda's death prompts John to try to force humanity from the workers by throwing their soma
rations out a window. The ensuing riot brings the police who soma-gas the crowd. Bernard and
Helmholtz arrive to help John, but only Helmholtz helps him, while Bernard stands to the side.

When they wake, Bernard, Helmholtz and John are brought before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World
Controller for Western Europe. Bernard and Helmholtz are told they will be sent to live in Iceland and
the Falkland Islands, two of several island colonies reserved for exiled citizens. Helmholtz looks

15
forward to living on the remote Falkland Islands, where he can become a serious writer. Bernard
grovels, begs, and betrays his friends. Mond reveals that exile to the islands, a frequent threat to prevent
unorthodox thinking, is where freethinkers are released, rather than repressed. Mond will not let John
move to an island, however, because he is still part of an experiment. Mustapha is a very interesting
character because he has been conditioned by Society, yet he has access to forbidden books such as
Shakespeare and religious books. He and John enter into an intense philosophical discussion where
Mustapha justifies the abolition of free thought, family, religion, art, and science in order to create a
society free of pain, crime, competion, and war.

In the final chapters, John isolates himself from society in a lighthouse outside London where he finds
his hermit life interrupted from within by lust for Lenina. To atone, John brutally whips himself out of
doors and eats mustard seed, which causes him to vomit. A paparazzi discovers his location and films
his self-flagellation, and puts effects where movie-goers can feel the whippings. This destroys his hermit
life from without as hundreds of gawking sightseers, intrigued by John's violent behavior, fly out to
watch the savage in person. Even Lenina comes to watch, crying a tear John does not see. The sight of
the woman whom he both adores and blames, is too much for him; John attacks and whips her. This
sight of genuine, unbridled emotion drives the crowd wild with excitement, and -- handling it as they are
conditioned to -- they turn on each other,in a frenzy of beating and chanting that devolves into a mass
orgy of soma and sex. In the morning, John, hopeless, alone and horrified by his drug use, debasement
and attack on Lenina, makes one last attempt to escape civilization and atone. When thousands of
gawking sightseers arrive that morning, frenzied at the prospect of seeing the savage perform again, they
find John hanging by the neck.

Fordism and society

Main article: The World State

The World State is built around the principles of Henry Ford, who has become a Messianic figure
worshipped by society. The word Lord has been replaced with the similar-sounding Ford. The calendar
counts years "After Ford" (AF), a parody of "Anno Domini" (AD), starting at 1908 when the Ford
Model T was created. The Christian cross has been replaced by the symbol "T", another reflection of the
Model T, as well as a symbolic cutting off of the upward-pointing part of the Cross (indicating that
belief in God has been abolished). Ford's famous phrase "History is bunk" has become The World
State's approach to the past, and the assembly line process is present in many aspects of life.

From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they
sleep (called "hypnopædia" in the book) to believe that their own class is best for them. Any residual
unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and a hallucinogenic drug called soma (Greek for "body"),
distributed by the Arch-Community Songster of Canterbury, a secularised version of the Anglican
Sacrament of Communion ("The Body of Christ").

Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in
Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in the 1920s, thirty years
before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. However, Mendel's work with inheritance
patterns in peas had been re-discovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on Darwinian
selection, was well established. Huxley's family included a number of prominent biologists including

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Thomas Huxley, half-brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and brother Julian Huxley who was a
biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. In light of this, the fact that Huxley emphasizes
conditioning over breeding is notable (see nature versus nurture). As the science writer Matt Ridley put
it, Brave New World describes an "environmental not a genetic hell." Human embryos and fetuses are
conditioned via a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins),
thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one's future career would dictate) and other environmental
stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.

Controversy

 In 1980, Brave New World was removed from classrooms in Miller, Missouri among other
challenges.[4] In 1993, an attempt was made to remove this novel from a California school's
required reading list because it "centered around negative activity".[5]
 The American Library Association ranks Brave New World as #52 on their list of The 100 Most
Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.
 A number of Polish critics believe Huxley plagiarized two science fiction novels – Miasto
światłości (The City of the Sun) and Podróż poślubna pana Hamiltona, written by Polish author
Mieczysław Smolarski in 1924.[6]

Comparisons with George Orwell's 1984

Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of 1984 and Brave New World in the foreword of his
1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no
reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would
deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to
passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth
would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley
feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy
porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil
libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's
almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.
In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate
will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on
Orwell, notes the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why
Americans Are Not Taught History":

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling
expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten
volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of
Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a
house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths

17
to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas
Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after
1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized
version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own
extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated
society where no serious history is taught.[7]

Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), written by Huxley almost thirty years after
Brave New World, was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved
toward or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original
novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future but in Brave New
World Revisited he concluded that the world was becoming much more like Brave New World much
faster than he thought.

Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation as well as all the means by which
populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal
suggestion. Brave New World Revisited is different in tone due to Huxley's evolving thought and his
conversion to Vedanta between the two books.

The Genius and the Goddess

The Genius and the Goddess is a novel by Aldous Huxley that was first published in 1955. It is the
fictional account of John Rivers, a student physicist in the 1920s who was hired out of college as a
laboratory assistant to Henry Maartens.

Plot summary

The story begins by John Rivers telling of his encounter with the Maartens family to a friend of his in
1951 because he still feels guilty for finding inspiration from another man's wife. In a moment of subtle
foreshadowing Rivers refers to his recollection of the past as "a little orgy of reminiscence to celebrate
one of your rare visits."

In 1921 John Rivers, piously sheltered by his widowed mother, and a newly minted PhD, is employed as
a lab assistance to Henry Maartens, a Nobel prize winning, but socially awkward physicist. He is invited
to live in Henry's home until he finds a place of his own but the Maartens family soon develop a
fondness for Rivers, and eventually insist on him staying. Rivers himself develops respect and fondness
for the family, regarding Henry as a genius and his wife Katy as a goddess. As his attraction towards
Katy grows Rivers simulataneously finds himself the object of infatuation by the Maartens' 15 year old
daughter, Ruth. Ruth, a dramatic poetess, only fantasizes that she is in love with Rivers as an attempt to
find solace and a sluice for her emotions after being rejected by a talented 17 year old football player
and scholarship winner.

River's experience with the Maartens family takes a hectic turn when Katy has to leave for a time to care
for her dying mother. The unstable Henry increasingly becomes an emotional wreck in the absence of

18
his much younger wife; the children, household, and most difficultly Henry himself are only cared for
by the negro housekeeper, Beluah and Rivers. Ruth takes advantage of her mother's absence to entertain
her cosmetic interests and acts out her "love" for Rivers, which he turns aside.

Katy returns because the stress of her absence has made (her husband) Henry deathly ill. She herself has
lost her "vigor," to the point she cannot minister to Henry. Learning her mother has died because of her
return, Katy turns to Rivers for solace, then sexual fulfillment. By losing his virginity Rivers not only
feels guilty for betraying his mother and pious background but for betraying his dying "master": Henry
Maartens. As Henry recovers Katy and John inevitably continue their affair - agreeing what Henry
doesn't know won't hurt him.

The imaginitive Ruth suspects that Rivers is in love with her mother and in an act of jealousy presents
Rivers with a poem that subtly describes his affair with her mother. Rivers laughs off the poem and says
that it reminds him of one of his father's sermons but despite his optimistic reaction he feels dejected.

Katy and Rivers agree that the only way out of the mess is for Rivers to leave. As Rivers prepares to
leave (alleging that his mother is ill) Katy and Ruth, in an argument, die in an automobile accident.

Rivers is devastated and only survives after meeting his former wife Helen at a party. Henry lives on,
quickly marrying Katy's sister (who succumbs to obesity) and after her death has a last and fourth
consecutive marriage to a young red head named Alicia. Henry dies at 87. Rivers is left with Henry's
biography and the memory of complex experiences that led to a beneficial change of direction in his life.

Themes

The short novel is packed with literary and socio-historical references and allusions. Huxley portrays
various aspects of his ideology about subjects such as God, sex, history, literature, intellect and death.
The following quotations are just several of such instances in the text.

"Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom it is hopeless."

"Dying's an art. And at our age we ought to be learning it... Helen knew how to die because she knew
how to live -to live now and here and for the greater glory of God. And that necessarily entails dying too
there and then and tomorrow and one's own miserable self. In the process of living as one ought to live,
Helen had been dying by daily instalments."

"And where there's no possible operational answer, there's no conceivable sense in the question. That's
why there can never be a science of history- because you can never test the truth of any of your
hypotheses..."

"But Henry hadn't died. That's the whole point. He'd merely left the clockwork running and gone
somewhere else." "Gone where?" "God knows. Into some kind of infantile burrow in his subconscious, I
suppose. Outside, for all to see and hear, was that stupendous clockwork monkey, that undiminished
blaze of intellectual power. Inside there lurked the miserable little creature who still needed flattery and
reassurance and sex and a womb-substitute--the creature who would have to face the music on Henry's
death-bed."

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Characters

 John Rivers – a physics student, protagonist

 Henry Maartens – physicist
 Katy Maartens – Henry's wife
 Ruth Maartens – Henry's daughter

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