Brave New World vs. 1984

I just finished Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I remember some of my friends reading it for a class in high school, but I never got to read it. So it's been on my list for a while. I thought I would like it because 1984 by George Orwell has the same futuristic utopian setting and it's on my list of favorite books. But, in fact, I did not like Brave New World.

Huxley's utopia was very creative and I'm sure hippies of the '60s were fans of his idea of sleeping with as many partners as you liked and taking soma tablets to "get away" when you started feeling anything but happy. So in that regard, his utopia has some future reality to it, especially because it was published in 1932.

1984 was published in 1948 (pretty easy to remember since the last two numbers just switch) and I think I liked it more because it focused on rebellion of the main character who was trapped inside the utopia. BNW has a main character whose thoughts somehow survived years of mental conditioning, but he is not the one to rebel. It is an outsider of the utopia who is brought inside and rebels. Not very surprising for an outsider to rebel to the backwards ways of the utopia. I thought Huxley lacked creativity there.

Who knows, maybe I liked 1984 more because I read it first. Maybe not.