Trivia / Brave New World

• Banned in China: Due to its sexual content and other controversial themes, it was banned in numerous countries for many years and, in America, has been on many a "banned book" list in most public schools.
• Creator Backlash: While Huxley didn't denounce the work as a whole, he did regret the Downer Ending where John is found dead from hanging himself^note which is also how the 1980 UK TV movie version ended, along with an epilogue that reveals that Mustafa Mond's social experiment involving John the Savage was a failure and telling his secretary to get rid of everything involving it, wishing he'd given John Savage a third choice between the barbaric world he'd escaped from and the decadent world he'd become disillusioned by^note it should be noted that the 1998 US TV movie version is more-or-less a Bittersweet Ending. While John dies after the paparazzi force him to fall off a cliff, Bernard and Lenina leave their society to live on a free island after Lenina tells Bernard that she's pregnant and the unnamed redhead boy who was struggling to get some sleep in the beginning uses some cotton from his pillow to block out the hypnotherapy, meaning that, while John the Savage died, he didn't die in vain, as Lenina and Bernard are now free to act like loving, caring human beings and that John's personality was an inspiration for a new generation. Huxley's final novel Island (1962), though not a direct sequel to BNW, was essentially written to expand on this idea.
• Defictionalization: Well, a real drug called Soma (a muscle relaxant) did come on the market in 1959 and remains in use today, though its effects are nothing like those of the book's Soma.
• Fake American: English actress Kate Fleetwood played American "savage" Sheila in the series.
• Fake Brit: In the series, three New Londoners are played by foreign actors putting on an English accent. Frannie (Canadian Kylie Bunbury) Henry (Australian Sen Mitsuji) and Jane (New Zealander Sophie McIntosh).
• Referenced by...: The titles of the Brave New Girl duology, Brave New Girl and Strange New World.
• Science Marches On: Huxley was ahead of his time in saying that fetal exposure to alcohol is unhealthy, but his assumption that it's possible to create a specific level of disability with a specific amount of alcohol is not true. In real life, the results are immensely more variable than Huxley suggests, and much of the difference has to be random chance: it's common for one member of a set of identical twins born to an alcoholic to be severely disabled and the other to be completely normal. His assumption that women need to go through fake pregnancy if they don't really get pregnant, and that darker-skinned women need to go through it at an earlier age because they're "...born to have babies young", is an unfortunate remnant of early 20th century racial and sexual theories that portrayed women in general as constantly subject to obeying their biological clock and black people (both men and women) as being more primitive on a biological level.

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