Best of Aldous Huxley

When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was initially published in 1932 it depicted a civilization bent on selfdestruction in language of pure fiction. Few of its furious detractors foresaw the outbreak of another international war complete with Holocaust and nuclear destruction. Huxley wrote Ape and Essence in 1948 after realising that the design of his antiutopia would eventually be altered by historical events. He sends us to the year 2108 in this horrific tale which takes the shape of a cinematic plot. The location is Los Angeles where a New Zealandled rediscovery expedition is attempting to make sense of what is left. To our dismay we learn about the twentysecondcentury manner of life from head botanist Alfred Poole. It was inevitable that Mr. Huxley should have written this book: one could almost have seen it since Hiroshima is the necessary sequel to Brave New World.—Alfred Kazin. The book has a certain awesome impressiveness; its sheer intractable bitterness cannot but affect the reader.—Time.