This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
- Actually rather a Utopia, since 99% of the population is perfectly happy with their lives. Appears dystopian as all the main characters are in the remaining percent (and they have to be, after all novels about perfectly happy people tend to be rather boring).
- This Troper's lit professor called it an "Anti-Utopia" - ie, it's wonderful for the inhabitants, but you wouldn't want to live there.
- This troper would say the point Huxley was trying to make is that's not the point. The vast majority of inhabitants of the Brave New World are made inferior from birth, everyone is forced to be happy and think like everyone else, and the few people who don't want to be happy or think like everyone else are the protagonists, none of whom live there at the end.
- This Troper thinks that this is a case of a Broken Aesop. In trying to make a point against his targeted social trends, Huxley accidentally created a workable society, complete with viable options for the 1% who would rather opt out.
- Viable, sure. For those who want to live in a primitive, diseased hellhole.
- How long would it remain a hellhole? Creativity and genius thrive in strife, because people don't like living in filth and disease. If the entire group is made up of individualists, they've at least got a thinking advantage over a populace who all thinks alike. People who are satisfied also don't tend to work as hard (ie. would you work any harder than the required minimum if you didn't want a promotion?) So you can be happy all the time, or after working for it you can have what we have now.
- A Dystopia is the true face of Utopia. e.g. A world that has eliminated hunger and over-population is a Utopia. It becomes a Dystopia when it is learned that the elderly, the handicapped, and the incarcerated are being made into a tasty sausage.
Gattsuru: The characters that enter society and then choose to leave it were not forced to the reservations, but to a different area that was essentially a mini Galt's Gulch (might be only true in later revisions). We're not told what the conditions are, but they're not supposed to be anything like the disease-ridden, primitive, religiously bound reservations. That's the scary part of this whole thing. Society is regressed to a pathetic parody of what it is in the real world, and the population is a giant mess of individuals stunted by constant brainwashing. Citizens can do whatever they want — screw, do drugs, join sports, write, make art — but it's absolutely and terrifyingly meaningless. The only drugs in demand just calm you down, the only sports no one every makes a name for themselves in, the only writing is advertising jingles, the only art orgy — and you only want them because the recording tells you to when you go to sleep every night. There is no disease, but also no desire; no wants and no goals, no demands and no growth. There's a spot for everyone in this world, and everyone likes their eventual position but the Savage (and he only because he specifically asks for and desires a place to be unpleasant in some sort of religious autoflagation), but it's not a place a sane person should want to live.
I'm also going to try example sorting this soon.
