Malthusian belt brave new world

Chapter Three

UTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

"Strange," mused the Director, as they turned away, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumpt





 

 

 


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"The immediate problem with our meat brains is that they have no back-up. We can lose the most precious information we have from one bump on the head or stroke. You want a mind system with back-up that can access other databases."

-
Bart Kosko





















Malthusian Belt


 



 



Readily available oral contraceptives.



 





As far as I know, the first reference to this idea in science fiction (or anywhere).



In the end," said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer



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Free Study Guide-Brave New World by Aldous Huxley-Free Booknotes

Table of Contents
| Printable Version | Barron's Booknotes

SPECIALIZED VOCABULARY FOR THE NOVEL



Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons:
the caste hierarchy in Utopia.


Anthrax Bomb:
a Pre-Ford weapon used in germ warfare.


Bokanovsky Process:
a process by which a human egg has its normal development arrested. It starts to bud and produces many identical eggs.


Bottling:
the stage where artificially created embryos are put into sowperitoneum-lined bottles for maturation.


Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy:
an intricate ball game played with complicated equipment.


Community Sing:
a pseudo-religious meeting for the lower castes, promoting fraternity.


Decanting:
the process by which Utopian embryos are removed from the bottles after maturation.


Ectogenesis:
birth outside the human body.


Emotional Engineering:
the profession responsible for preparing propagandistic diversions for the people.


Erotic Play:
a pastime for Utopian children, involving exploration of each other's bodies and meant to absolve all feelings of guilt associate

Tools of Characterization




Character Analysis

Direct Characterization

Huxley isn't one for subtlety. It isn't enough to show Bernard's insecurity around the lower castes; instead, we get this: 


The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.


Then we get to Helmholtz, whose physical appearance clues us in to his self-confidence. But then Huxley goes into telling mode again:


A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect. […] A mental excess became in its turn a cause of wider separation. That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. […] It was only quite recently that, grown aware of his menta