Simulation and Simulacra in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Baudrillardian Appraisal

A Brave New Integration World

Brave New World

Scientific publishing began in 1665 with the inauguration of the Journal des sçavans in France and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England. These enterprises established the pattern that has endured to the present: that of a learned publication, financed privately, which shared knowledge within a select circle. By recording a date of publication, claims of scientific prio...

Brave New World

Written in 1931 and published the following year, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a dystopian—or anti-utopian—novel. In it, the author questions the values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray a futuristic world in which many of the contemporary trends in British and American society have been taken to extremes. Though he was already a best-selling author, Huxley achieved intern...

Brave new RNA world.

In 1995, you could still find, in the opening paragraphs of manuscripts and grant applications from my lab and others, the phrase “In the absence of a crystal structure for the ribosome....,” by way of rationalizing any number of biochemical studies aimed at figuring out the three-dimensional locations of things inside the ribosome, and ultimately its mechanism. We no longer have this excuse. T...

Health Departments in a Brave New World

The number of people at risk for chronic diseases is increasing, and methods for reducing risk and promoting health are becoming more complex. Demands of changing political and social environments, as well as economic and demographic trends, are forcing state and local health departments to reassess what is most important and make judicious choices that will yield the greatest gains. Health dep...