Recommendations

Books Like Brave New World

What to read after Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is the great alternative dystopia — control through pleasure rather than pain, manufacturing compliance rather than forcing it. If you loved the philosophical depth, the World State's terrifying plausibility, and the Savage John's confrontation with what happiness costs, these eight books will satisfy the same appetite.

  1. 1

    1984

    by George Orwell

    The other foundational 20th century dystopia — control through pain and terror rather than through pleasure; Huxley wrote to Orwell to argue that his own vision was more likely to prevail, but both have proven prophetic of different aspects of contemporary societies

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  2. 2

    The Handmaid's Tale

    by Margaret Atwood

    A theocratic Republic that controls women's bodies — the most significant post-Orwell, post-Huxley dystopian novel; interested in the same questions about what a total system does to a person and how compliance is manufactured

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  3. 3

    We

    by Yevgeny Zamyatin

    The 1924 Russian novel that directly inspired both 1984 and Brave New World — citizens of the One State in glass-walled buildings living transparent, perfectly rational lives; the source of the tradition both Orwell and Huxley were working in

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  4. 4

    Fahrenheit 451

    by Ray Bradbury

    A fireman who burns books in a future where people are kept passive through entertainment — interested in the same question as Brave New World about what happens when pleasure and distraction replace critical thought

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  5. 5

    Never Let Me Go

    by Kazuo Ishiguro

    People who have been assigned a fate by a society that has decided their bodies exist for its use — quieter than Brave New World but examining the same question about how people accept unjust fates when the system has made acceptance seem natural

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  6. 6

    Never Let Me Go

    by Kazuo Ishiguro

    People who have been assigned a fate by a society that has decided their bodies exist for its use — quieter than Brave New World but examining the same question about how people accept unjust fates when the system has made acceptance seem natural

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  7. 7

    Brave New World Revisited

    by Aldous Huxley

    Huxley's 1958 non-fiction essay collection examining which of his Brave New World predictions had come true in the twenty-five years since publication — often scarier than the novel because it is real

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