Kris Ashton

Life experience can make an enormous difference to the way a person interprets a novel. Back in the late 1990s, I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time and its prescience (at least as I saw it then) had a profound impact on me. I was peripherally enmeshed in the party drug scene at the time, and Huxley’s vision of a world made soft and obedient through mood-altering drugs seemed a far more accurate prediction than the paranoid nightmare outlined in George Orwell’s 1984. Of course, this was the last gasp of the era before the September 11 terrorist attacks changed politics (and social media changed how those politics would be disseminated and debated) forever, and Orwell’s concerns are now front and centre again, but to a kid in his early twenties, Huxley’s foresight seemed remarkable.

When the estimable non-fiction editor at Aurealis, Terry Wood, suggested a look back at some older sci-fi writers might make a good topic for an essay, and he listed Huxley’s name as a possible subject, it set my neurons afire. I had in more recent years read and been similarly impressed with Ira Levin’s dystopian novel This Perfect Day and it rekindled my love for the genre. Once I’d officially received the commission from Terry, I commenced my research with a re-reading of Brave New World. 

Never before had I revisited a book and found such a vast disparity between my recollections of it and what was on the pages before me. What I had retained from my first read-through – the drug use – amounted to a small fraction of the book’s total, and I might as well have been encountering the characters and huge tracts of plot for the first time. I also recollected the pacing being more frantic. On this second read – more than two decades after the first – I found the centre section of Brave New World rather plodding. Odd indeed, since my tolerance for a more languid pace has, if anything, become greater. In a sense, it was as though two different people had read the book.

But reacquainting myself with Brave New World (and 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and This Perfect Day) proved to be quite the intellectual journey and, as I assessed each book, a clear recurring theme began to emerge – one which formed the framework for the essay in Aurealis, titled ‘Individualism in 20th Century Dystopian fiction’. If you have an interest in this sub-genre (which melds sci-fi, horror and political allegory in a unique way), I hope you’ll buy a copy of the magazine and send me your thoughts about the essay and the subject at large.