Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

I just finished reading this again, and it's strange how much dorkier it seems than it did when I was fifteen. And there's all this jarring casual racism when they're talking about genetic engineering, oh the Negro uterus is much more fertile blah blah blah, makes it hard to read at times. Still, I realized what a huge influence this book had on me as a teenager, not the last half so much (I didn't remember having read any of it) but the opening, where they're talking about social conditioning. See, whenever I buy a copy of the Globe and Mail, or sneer at people in SUVs, or look askance at the track suits in Honest Ed's, I hear this little voice in the back of my head saying, "I'm so glad I'm a Beta!" - and I'd sort of forgotten that this book was where I'd picked that up. So I'm glad I read it again for that. And also for the kitsch value (i'm so glad i'm a beta), this weird idea that people would feel that they needed to formalize social engineering to such an insane degree mainly in order to have a stable underclass to operate the elevators.