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Despite first being published more than thirty years ago, Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, has remained startling and unfortunately relevant. While that unnerving prescience is true of virtually all great dystopian fiction, Atwood's tale of a woman relegated to the role of human broodmare in a theocracy is profoundly unsettling in a way that few others in the genre can match. Perhaps it is the rules Atwood set for herself in writing The Handmaid's Tale, the fact that she "would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist." Or it could be that there is a disconcerting truth in Atwood's core assumption that the U.S. was more deeply tied to the theocracy of seventeenth-century Puritan New England - and the attendant subservient roles of women - than the eighteenth-century period of the Enlightenment and the ideal of a separation of church and state. Or it may be the fact that we continue to live in a society where a room full of men gather to discuss what health care procedures should be made available to women. Regardless, The Handmaid's Tale feels as vital today as it did in 1985.

Hulu's recent adaptation of the novel is closing its first ten-episode season. Having managed to pull off the remarkable feat of remaining true to the source material while simultaneously moving beyond the borders of the page to both expand and accentuate the main narrative, "The Handmaid's Tale" proved an unquestioned success for Hulu's original programming lineup. Despite often being as difficult to watch as the book is to read - watching with my wife, I finished each episode with a sort of queasy unease that never quite dissipated - it was nonetheless completely enthralling television. Thankfully, Hulu has already renewed the series for a second season and, given the quality of the adaptation thus far, expectations are high. Of course, high expectations invariably make the wait between seasons of a show that much more excruciating. Thankfully, there is no shortage of quality literary works to hold us over as we await the return of "The Handmaid's Tale." Much like this latest addition to the small screen dystopian canon, the novels below are thought-provoking and chilling examinations of themes ranging from womanhood in an oppressive society to reproductive rights and the objectification of the female body.

A Novel

For those looking for a spot to land after finishing "The Handmaid's Tale," why not check out more from Margaret Atwood? While there are a multitude of worthy options, this 1996 historical fiction novel is a good place to start. Centering on Grace Marks, notorious for the 1843 murders of her employer and his mistress in Canada, the novel explores the themes of societal hierarchy and feminine identity within an oppressive domestic structure. Alias Grace is also the basis for an upcoming Netflix adaptation, so it's a particularly good time to get in on the ground floor.

Margaret Atwood

This 1997 bestseller from Anita Diamant delves into the story of Dinah, a daughter of Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. In the pages of the Bible, Dinah's existence is only hinted at; in The Red Tent, Diamant uses Dinah to explore the traditions, turmoil, and trials of womanhood in a deeply and overtly patriarchal ancient world. The novel was adapted into a two-part mini-series by the Lifetime Network in 2014.

Similar to The Handmaid's Tale, this 1992 novel by P.D. James explores the ramifications of mass infertility on society. Children of Men focuses on a small group of dissidents who may hold the key to humanity's survival in a near future where the human race has become infertile and the last generation born has reached adulthood. A sustained sense of hopelessness and suspense fuels James's novel, which is an insightful examination of society coping with the inability to reproduce, a society that has nearly given up as a result of these circumstances. The novel was adapted in 2006 by Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón.

Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, is told from the point of view of Kathy as she looks back at her seemingly idyllic years at an isolated boarding school in England and her long-lasting friendship with two of her classmates, Ruth and Tommy. Despite the school's strange practices and bizarre rules, Kathy had forged a strong bond with Ruth and Tommy. It is only years later that the weight of the school's true purpose and of their very existence comes crashing down on Kathy and her friends. Never Let Me Go was adapted into a 2010 film of the same name.

With this satirical deconstruction of the suburban American ideal, Ira Levin has created an enduring piece of pop culture and coined a term that made its way into the national lexicon. The novel centers on Joanna, a woman who moves to a seemingly idyllic community with her husband and children. The more she interacts with and observes her neighbors, however, the more it all seems too good to be true and the sinister undercurrent of the community of Stepford begins to show its face.

In this chilling, prescient dystopia, Octavia E. Butler imagines a near-future America beset by environmental and economic crises. The 1993 novel follows teenager Lauren Olamina, an empath who viscerally feels the emotions and pain of others. After losing her family in a night of shocking violence, Lauren sets out into the world beyond her walled community seeking a better life that may not exist.

With The Unit, Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist crafts a world where unmarried and childless women over the age of fifty and men over the age of sixty are sent to live in posh retirement communities with state-of-the-art facilities and lavish apartments. The only catch? These people are considered "dispensable" and forced to donate their organs until their final donation is made. The Unit is a haunting examination of the value of human life.

In this reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, a future society has risen where the line between church and state is nonexistent and criminals are no longer imprisoned, rather they are "chromed" - a process where their skin is genetically altered to match the class of their crime. Hannah Payne, a pious and devoted woman, is convicted of murdering her unborn child and chromed red. She is now forced to navigate a hostile world where her crime is apparent to all by the color of her skin. In doing so, Hannah is set on a path of self-discovery that leaves her questioning everything she once believed.

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What to Read After Finishing Hulu's 'The Handmaid's Tale' - Signature

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Despite first being published more than thirty years ago, Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, has remained startling and unfortunately relevant. While that unnerving prescience is true of virtually all great dystopian fiction, Atwood's tale of a woman relegated to the role of human broodmare in a theocracy is profoundly unsettling in a way that few others in the genre can match.

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15 things you might not know about Cat's Cradle: 

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15 things you might not know about Cat's Cradle: 

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Even the most diehard Vonnegut fan may not be familiar with these facts about Cat's Cradle, one of the author's best-known works-and one of the 20th century's most beloved satires.

1. KURT VONNEGUT GOT THE IDEA FOR CAT'S CRADLE WHILE WORKING AT GENERAL ELECTRIC.

A background studying chemistry at Cornell University, mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee, and anthropology at the University of Chicago-not to mention experience working as a journalist for the City News Bureau of Chicago-led a 25-year-old Vonnegut to, of all things, a job in public relations for General Electric in 1947.

Vonnegut spent his time on the clock interviewing the corporation's vast array of scientific minds and, as he put it, "asking them what they were up to" in the hopes of capturing a conversation worthy of the public eye. Vonnegut's collective gatherings ultimately fueled the idea for two of his novels: Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Like Vonnegut, the narrator of Cat's Cradle is a writer swept up in a story about a scientific discovery.

2. THE NOVEL'S MAIN CHARACTER WAS MODELED AFTER A REAL NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING SCIENTIST.

In Cat's Cradle 's fictional world history, Dr. Felix Hoenikker is a Nobel Prize winner who boasts principal credit for inventing the atomic bomb. Vonnegut invented the character following a particularly rich interaction with Irving Langmuir, a pioneer in atomic theory and himself a Nobel laureate. Vonnegut took special note of Langmuir's absolute ambivalence about the possibility of his research "falling into the wrong hands." The author slipped this trait into the characterization of Hoenikker.

3. VONNEGUT BORROWED SOME OF LANGMUIR'S MORE ECCENTRIC QUIRKS FOR THE HOENIKKER CHARACTER.

In a 1977 conversation with The Paris Review, Vonnegut admitted to swiping a few traits directly from the real Langmuir for his novel. "Langmuir was wonderfully absentminded," Vonnegut said. "He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in."

4. MUCH OF THE SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED IN THE NOVEL WAS BASED ON WORK DONE BY VONNEGUT'S BROTHER.

Vonnegut's brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist working for General Electric since 1945, was responsible for getting Vonnegut the job at GE in the first place. Bernard Vonnegut was a partner of Langmuir in the pursuit of an understanding, and perhaps the manipulation or synthetic reproduction, of snow.

5. LANGMUIR ORIGINALLY PITCHED THE ICE-NINE STORY TO A DIFFERENT AUTHOR.

Basic characterization is hardly all Vonnegut derived (or, as some would put it, stole) from Langmuir. The ice-nine concept-a chemical bastardization of ice that remains stable at room temperature-was Langmuir's idea, which he had pitched previously as the premise for a potential science fiction story to writer H. G. Wells. The Time Machine author was uninterested, leaving Vonnegut to snatch the concept for his 1963 novel.

6. VONNEGUT WAS DRIVEN TO WRITE THE NOVEL BY HIS MORAL OBJECTION TO INDIFFERENCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.

"I was hideously disillusioned-that is when I lost my innocence, really-when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima," Vonnegut says in the 1983 BBC Arena documentary Kurt Vonnegut So It Goes. While the World War II veteran's experiences as a POW are best known for inspiring his later novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's emotional reaction to the United States' use of the atom bomb on Japan helped shape the themes of Cat's Cradle.

In the documentary, Vonnegut explains how this cynicism only grew during his stint at General Electric. "It seemed wrong to me, in view of some of (Langmuir's) discoveries, that he should be so indifferent to what became of them," he says. "This dreadful substance, which is discovered by a man who is purely interested in truth, finally winds up in the hands of a dictator and-not to leave you in suspense-the world ends."

7. CAT'S CRADLE EARNED VONNEGUT A MASTER'S DEGREE.

Before he became one of the great voices of American science fiction, Vonnegut earned a reputation at the University of Chicago as a student of little promise. After his original master's thesis, which compared 19th century Cubist painters with 19th century Native Americans, went nowhere, he started on Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, which traced how different cultures' stories have their own distinct footprints, providing hints as to their origins. However, Vonnegut left school without earning his degree. Just shy of 25 years later, the institution decided to accept Cat's Cradle as his submitted thesis, and granted Vonnegut his Master of Arts at last.

8. VONNEGUT COLLABORATED ON AN ORATORIO ADAPTATION OF THE BOOK.

We're accustomed to seeing great works of literature adapted for film and television, but Cat's Cradle's reimagining as an album is pretty unusual. To make matters more interesting, Vonnegut himself was involved in adapting his story. The author wrote and performed the prose lyrics to a nine-track oratorio based on his novel. The project was spearheaded by musician and Columbia University neuroscientist David Soldier (real name: Sulzer), and was released as the studio album Ice-9 Ballads in 2001. The Manhattan Chamber Orchestra and Jimmy Justice contributed to the piece.

9. A MINOR PLANET AND ITS MOON WERE NAMED FOR THE BOOK.

In September of 1999, astronomers David C. Jewitt, Jane X. Luu, and Chadwick Trujillo discovered a cubewano-that is, an object whose revolution extends beyond Neptune's orbit (a range known as the Kuiper belt)-and its "moon." The trio borrowed the terms "Borasisi" and "Pabu," which refer to the mythical personifications of the sun and the moon in the fictional language of San Lorenzan featured in Cat's Cradle, to name their discoveries.

10. FOLLOWERS OF THE BOOK'S FICTIONAL RELIGION MEET EVERY YEAR AT BURNING MAN.

An adamant critic of religion, Vonnegut likely never intended for his creation, Bokononism, to earn a following beyond the shores of the fictional San Lorenzo. Nevertheless, Cat's Cradle's ideology of "harmless untruths" is celebrated year after year at California music festival Burning Man. The Camp of Bokonon has become a fixture of the annual event, preaching the bliss of Lionel Boyd Johnson's embrace of the foma.

11. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HELPED FUEL VONNEGUT'S RELIGIOUS SATIRE.

Along with the novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain, a short piece by George Bernard Shaw was a heavy influence on Cat's Cradle. "To hell with the plays," Vonnegut joked during a 2003 discussion with The Progressive, emphasizing the impact that reading Shaw's prefaces, in particular, had on his writing. Vonnegut recalled a religious satire penned by Shaw as a preface to his 1912 drama Androcles and the Lion: "Why Not Give Christianity a Trial?" (incorrectly referred to by Vonnegut in the interview as "Christianity-Why Not Give It a Try?").

12. VONNEGUT ALMOST QUIT WRITING ALTOGETHER BEFORE HE EVEN BEGAN CAT'S CRADLE.

Following his tenure with General Electric and the publication of his first book, Player Piano, Vonnegut endured a quick, ostensibly agonizing stint as a writer for Sports Illustrated. Frustrated throughout his employ by the banality of his assignments, Vonnegut was brought to his breaking point when told to write a story about a racehorse that had hopped the fence of his owners' grounds and run away. He wrote only, " The horse jumped over the f-----g fence," and quit the gig on the spot, believing himself to be done with the written word altogether. Afterwards, Vonnegut spent a similarly brief period managing a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

13. HE GOT BACK INTO WRITING NOVELS TO SUPPORT HIS THREE NEPHEWS.

Vonnegut took on a new financial burden when he adopted his three nephews following the sudden deaths of their parents (his sister and brother-in-law) in 1958. With three children of his own already, Vonnegut returned to the only career in which he was certain he could sustain employment: writing. Judging himself as unfit for any other line of work and in newly dire need of regular income, Vonnegut engaged once again with his literary passions, turning out novels The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and Cat's Cradle over the next five years.

14. CAT'S CRADLE WAS ONE OF ONLY TWO OF HIS OWN BOOKS THAT VONNEGUT GRADED AN A-PLUS.

In the two decades following Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut published a legion of novels, short story and essay collections, and stage plays that attracted mainstream attention and critical acclaim. However, Vonnegut wasn't especially satisfied with how some of his works turned out. In the eighteenth chapter of the 1981 collection Palm Sunday, Vonnegut took each of his published pieces to task with the assignment of an academic letter grade. He doled out two Ds (for the 1971 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June and the 1976 novel Slapstick), three Cs (for the 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, the 1974 collection Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, and for Palm Sunday itself), one B-minus (for the 1968 collection Welcome to the Monkey House), one B (for the 1952 novel Player Piano), four As (for the 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, the 1961 novel Mother Night, the 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and the 1979 novel Jailbird), and two A-pluses (for Cat's Cradle and the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five).

15. THE NOVEL INSPIRED A GRATEFUL DEAD BUSINESS VENTURE.

In 1970, the popular rock band the Grateful Dead founded a San Francisco-based publishing company named Ice Nine, through which all of its music and lyrics would be copyrighted.

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15 Things You Might Not Know About Cat's Cradle

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Even the most diehard Vonnegut fan may not be familiar with these facts about Cat's Cradle, one of the author's best-known works-and one of the 20th century's most beloved satires. 1. KURT VONNEGUT GOT THE IDEA FOR CAT'S CRADLE WHILE WORKING AT GENERAL ELECTRIC.

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Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" has officially become a multi-generational experience, appealing to feminists who felt they could relate to the book's contents back in 1985 as well as the new crop of viewers (and readers) who haven't even graduated high school yet, but are old enough to know that all's not well in our world.

Most of the show's fans will fall somewhere in the middle, with at least a passing familiarity with the mastermind of its plot. The sheer diversity of Margaret Atwood's imagination makes it possible for any literate person to independently stumble across one of her titles here or there, depending on their inclination toward historical fiction, sci-fi, gender studies, or just plain literary fiction

It's intimidating to admit you don't know an iconic author's work as well as you should, but the high quality of Atwood's canon provides numerous entry points for newcomers who really want to see what else she can do. (Her most recent offering, a novella called that riffs on Shakespeare's The Tempest, is newly available in paperback, so there's even an option that's still new to almost everybody.)

Which Atwood would you like to meet first? Here are a few of her most oft-recurring incarnations.
Atwood, the Historical Novelist
Just as the author has claimed she was able to imagine nightmare futures by studying historical atrocities, so Alias Grace opens a dark window into the past with the ambition of revealing how we ended up wherever we are now.

Set in the nineteenth-century wilds of upper Canada, the book explores a sensational murder case by getting into the head of its main suspect, a servant girl whose difficult life has led her to imprisonment following the violent deaths of her master and his housekeeper. Grace's notoriety and symptoms of "hysteria" make her a subject of interest to doctors and spiritualists of her era; can such a marked woman ever hope to be exonerated, let alone rehabilitated?

Atwood's gritty, distinctly post-modern writing style elevates this tale above anything you might expect when you hear the words "historical drama." Also, if you start right away you can be in on the ground floor when Netflix debuts its "Alias Grace" miniseries later this year.
Atwood, the Crossover Wunderkind
While a lot of her fiction is Canada-centric (you've gotta admire someone who remains so loyal to their homeland), books like The Blind Assassin refuse to be pigeonholed as "regional interest." Atwood catapults this book's characters out into the wider world, arcing across the entire twentieth century and even giving Atwood a chance to flex her mental muscle in the science fiction genre along the way, all while technically being set in Ontario.

Winning a pile of literary awards upon its release just after the millennium, Assassin unpacks the struggle between two close sisters - only one of whom has survived to see old age. This book is the ultimate kiss-off to people who think women only want to write about certain subjects, or see history through a certain lens. Sex, war, suicide, politics, and alien invaders - Atwood can do them all, at once, on roller skates if she so chooses.
Atwood, the "Prophet of Dystopia"
That's the title The New Yorker hung on Peggy earlier this year, and the shoe definitely fits. She's also been credited with ushering in a revolution in the subgenre of " cli-fi" (that's climate fiction), largely on the strength of her diabolical Maddaddam trilogy, which kicks the legs out from under any hope a reader might have that science - especially as practiced by our tech industry elite - is here to save us.

Beginning with Oryx and Crake, this series peeks ten minutes or so into the future at a society that's truly sagging at the seams, in which class warfare, mass-extinction, and misguided genetic experiments hold even more sway than they do now. This first installment introduces the humans responsible for engineering the plague that effectively ends humankind, as well as our replacements. The result is an entirely new eco-system, which poses a brutal Darwinian challenge for Earth's remaining inhabitants, homegrown and lab-grown alike.

The sequel, The Year of the Flood, widens that lens to include two other plague survivors, each imparting their unique perspective to the post- Anthropocene epoch, and the finale, Maddaddam, draws all these players (human and otherwise) into a gruesome confrontation that will probably determine humanity's fate once and for all.

It's no wonder Atwood expanded the first novel into a full trilogy: Here we see the unbridled joy of an author letting her imagination off the leash, minting new creatures and coining new terms almost faster than the reader can absorb. This is how someone from 1995 would feel if you plunked them into the year 2017, where we scarcely flinch at headlines like " Monica Lewinski Fights Cyberbullying With New Emojis." We are moving faster than we think, but we need help from authors like Atwood to help us sense the motion.
Atwood, the Unflinching Feminist
The 1988 novel wasn't an easy one to sell to publishers - not even for the author of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood has spoken up since about the resistance she faced from those who were nervous about losing ground in the feminist movement, and considered it risky to tell stories that didn't paint women and girls in an unabashedly positive light.

The story she'd written was about the agony and ecstasy (but mostly the former) of girlhood friendships, and the lasting effects they can have on an adult woman's psyche. This was written before "Heathers" or Queen Bees and Wannabes (the book that inspired Tina Fey to make "Mean Girls"), in an era when the feminist struggle for better representation was tied to likeable, sympathetic female characters.

Despite these misgivings, Cat's Eye succeeded in demonstrating why femininity's dark, savage side is just as worthy of our attention, especially in the hands of a sophisticated storyteller who can help readers feel (or in many cases, relive) this pain without exploiting it for mere entertainment value.
Atwood, the Budding Novelist
Sometimes the best way to get to know a writer is by tracing their path from the very beginning. Beginning with The Edible Woman in 1969, Atwood (then thirty years old) announced herself as a formidable literary presence in the making. , which followed a few years later, doubled down on themes of alienation and madness, particularly as they pertain to the upheaval in gender roles imparted by the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s.

In these early novels, Atwood narrowed her focus to serious literary fiction with a dash of Canadiana; while her more peculiar influences and obsessions creep into the margins, she actually didn't break out of this cocoon until The Handmaid's Tale, the success of which seemed to finally give her the confidence to embellish her fictional worlds (and impose her own creative priorities) on a much larger scale.

These early novels are on the smaller side, which makes for quick reading. Tackling them in order provides the kind of cumulative experience that has you cheering for Atwood (not just as an author, but as a person) by the time you reach that breakthrough. This is also why those who've been following along since the beginning remain so devoted to her, even if they may not have gotten around to picking up one of Atwood's more recent novels. Hers remains the classic story of a young woman exceeding every imaginable expectation - and then inventing whole new ones for herself aspire to, and then conquering those as well.

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Beyond Gilead: A Margaret Atwood Readers' Guide - Signature Reads

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Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" has officially become a multi-generational experience, appealing to feminists who felt they could relate to the book's contents back in 1985 as well as the new crop of viewers (and readers) who haven't even graduated high school yet, but are old enough to know that all's not well in our world.

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George Orwell is suddenly, understandably en vogue - 1984 spiked on Amazon and then sold out, his scathing 1940 review of Mein Kampf has been dredged up, and reading groups are springing up like toadstools, eager to discuss the ways language can be manipulated by would-be tyrants in order to suppress independent thought.

Topical though he may be, Orwell certainly isn't the only game in town when it comes to predicting increasingly dire futures for mankind. While he's definitely the forefather of the booming genre of dystopiana, other authors have since picked up that torch and used it to illuminate some very dark corners indeed. At this point it's no longer a matter of which predictions will come true, but how elegantly they'll all knit together in unison.

The following quotes are like glimpses into various portholes, each author imparting their own particular view of life in a no-longer-quite-recognizable society. The bad news is, as a civilization we're probably boned; the good news is we've managed to leave behind an elegant, impressively thorough catalog of our collective failures. (We were, after all, only human.)

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Epitaph For The Race of Man, 1934
"Before this cooling planet shall be cold,
Long, long before the music of the Lyre,
Like the faint roar of distant breakers rolled
On reefs unseen, when wind and flood conspire
To drive the ships inshore - long, long, I say,
Before this ominous humming hits the ear,
Earth will have come upon a stiller day,
Man and his engines be no longer here.
High on his naked rock the mountain sheep
Will stand alone against the final sky,
Drinking a wind of danger new and deep,
Staring on Vega with a piercing eye,
And gather up his slender hooves and leap
From crag to crag down Chaos, and so go by."

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Beyond Orwell: 11 Illuminating Quotes From the Canon of Dystopia

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George Orwell is suddenly, understandably en vogue - 1984 spiked on Amazon and then sold out, his scathing 1940 review of Mein Kampf has been dredged up, and reading groups are springing up like toadstools, eager to discuss the ways language can be manipulated by would-be tyrants in order to suppress independent thought.

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What Did Author Philip K. Dick Think of 'Blade Runner'?

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Sadly Philip K. Dick was not able to see 'Blade Runner' in it's entirety. He died early that next year, a couple of months shy from the release. Regardless, not only did 'Blade Runner' revolutionize sci-fi cinema but brought more of the author's written work to light, bringing forth a series of movie adaptations from 'Minority Report' to 'Total Recall.'

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Courtesy of Henry Holt and Company

IM Global Television has announced it is developing an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle."

The story involves the children of a Nobel laureate physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb and a substance called ice-nine, an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature. "Cat's Cradle" will be developed by Brad Yonover and Elkins Entertainment's Sandi Love, who will co-exec produce.

IM Global Television has also secured rights to the "Darkover" science-fiction book series by Marion Zimmer Bradley ("The Mists of Avalon"). Ilene Kahn Power ("Traffic") and Elizabeth Stanley will exec produce.

The studio is out to buyers with "Den of Thieves," a crime drama starring Carla Gugino, written by Sebastian Gutierrez and exec produced by Trigger Street's Dana Brunetti and Kevin Spacey. All 10 episodes of the first season have been written, and Gutierrez is planning to direct.

IM Global Television is also developing "1906," a six-hour miniseries that chronicles the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. David S. Ward will exec produce with director Martin Campbell ("Casino Royale") and producers Mark R. Harris, Julie Ruthenbeck and Susan Lee Smith.

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Kurt Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle' Set for TV Adaptation by IM Global

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IM Global Television has announced it is developing an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle." The story involves the children of a Nobel laureate physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb and a substance called ice-nine, an alternative structure of water that is solid...

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"Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"
"I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."

A 1932 dystopian novel written by Aldous Huxley. Quite possibly the only serious Western Dystopia involving too much happiness... as provided by the totalitarian state.

In the future, most of humanity and the environment people live in has been tailored to make everyone happy. There are five castes of people (Alphas through Epsilons), divided further into sub-castes ranging from the leader Alpha Pluses down through the barely-human grunt Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons. Everyone is grown in jars and their general roles in society planned before "birth". The population is pacified with virtual reality and the pleasure drug soma. Human needs are satisfied-by biological engineering when necessary; orgies are the norm; and anything that might possibly cause dissatisfaction is simply left out of society.

The cost of continuing to breed people smart enough to keep society running is the risk of emotional instability in those people. Genius creates the risk of madness-yes, in this society, unhappiness qualifies as madness. We have a Type Alpha who is not as tall and strong and beautiful as most, looking more like a Type Gamma; there are continual jokes about his jar getting spiked with alcohol. He fantasizes about being unhappy. And we have a Type Alpha who's in a critical position in society: he writes advertising jingles. Unfortunately, he suddenly wants to create True Art, and True Art Is Angsty. (No, he doesn't actually create True Art. Wanting to is bad enough.)

The only exception to all of this are the " Savage Reservations", barbaric and primal communities where people still live with nature and its cruelties and limitations, where people are born naturally and know the full range of emotions. After growing up on a New Mexico reservation, one of the novel's protagonists leaves for the wider world ( along with bringing some Shakepeare with him), where he quickly becomes a celebrity but at the cost of his own sanity as his ideals and emotions clash horribly with that of the rest of society.

This novel is famous for quite a few things. For one, the biological techniques described in the book (such as cloning) would turn out to be remarkably similar to those used in the modern day, despite this novel being written in the 1920s, decades before real science would ever reach this stage. It helps that Huxley is a member of one of Britain's most important and productive scientific families (his older brother Julian was a leading evolutionary biologist and his grandfather Thomas was Darwin's Bulldog, the man who argued Darwin's idea in public for him.).

It's also a true example of Crapsaccharine World and Crapsack Only by Comparison, and one of the few true examples of a fully developed, internally consistent, Blue and Orange Morality. The Brave New World is a fully-functioning society where everyone is happy, youthful, healthy and productive, but it is presented as a dystopia because this comes at the cost of creativity, free will and progression. The Reservation is a free community of emotion, but it is also a dirty, disease-ridden tribal wasteland where the weak are ostracized and pain equals redemption. Aldous Huxley would later go on to express regret at not including a third option that would have been a happy medium of the two. (He does, in his later book Island, but not for the Savage.)

Huxley has often been accused (including by Kurt Vonnegut) of plagiarizing in writing Brave New World. Despite the numerous similarities between the two books, Huxley has always denied this, so compare and contrast the two.

Also, this book is frequently compared to Nineteen Eighty Four as a way of showing the perspectives of the dystopia-esque society. Note that Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that what we fear controls us, while Brave New World shows that what we love controls us.

Also compare Fahrenheit 451, a later work with similar themes of an oppressive, pleasure-driven society, vacuous entertainment, suppression of emotions and the elimination of the past (i.e. books).

Also compare Equilibrium, which also uses many of the same themes of emotion control oppression by a World State that decides how people should feel.

And before you ask, the Iron Maiden song of the same name was inspired by the book. Not to be confused with the second expansion of the fifth installment of Civilization. Or the Japanese novel and anime series Shin Sekai Yori, whose English name is From the New World

This novel provides examples of:

All Issues Are Political Issues: Bernard does this a lot.

Alliterative Name: Mustapha Mond.

All of the Other Reindeer: John the Savage is kept from volunteering for sacrifice on the reservation because he is white. He is then treated as an outsider and gawked at in London. And Bernard, as he is treated like a leper for being prudish about the free sex culture in the Brave New World.

Alternative Calendar: The story starts in 632 AF ("After Ford"), or AD 2540. 1 AF was 1908, the year the Model T came out.

Anti-Escapism Aesop: Soma is presented as a perfect, non-addictive drug that everyone consumes daily for a delightful euphoric "holiday" with no unpleasant side-effects that might decrease productivity. And That's Terrible. Although later it's implied that might have a hand with why no one can makes it past sixty, since those that are too old or depressed would just put themselves on permanent holiday until they die.

Anti-Villain: Despite being one of the ten World Controllers, Mustapha Mond comes off as sympathetic (in both senses - he has sympathy for others, and the reader may tend to like him), because he secretly enjoys much of the old 'smutty' material such as Shakespeare and regrets the sacrifice of things such as truth and freedom. He believes, in his own full capacity, that the sacrifices are worth it.

As pointed out by Mark Rosenfelder : "Mond underestimates human potential, but his values are not evil, as Big Brother's are. He doesn't want to stamp on the face of humanity forever; he wants peace, prosperity, and happiness."

At one point when ordering the exile of Bernard and Helmholtz to an island, he comments that he's happy that the world has so many islands to send dissidents to, as the alternative would have to be their execution. He offers exiles, such as Helmholtz, their choice of places to be sent to; Helmholtz chooses an island with a bad climate, such as the Falklands, on the grounds that it would stimulate his creativity.

Arc Words: "O brave new world, that has such people in it..."

Artistic License – Biology: Groups of identical cloned people, regardless of how many there are in the group, are always called "twins". Justified, since for instance calling a group of 10,000 "decimilliuplets" would be rather clumsy to say the least.

Bedtime Brainwashing: This effect uses the proper scientific term, "hypnopaedia." A combination of Pleasant, Troubling and Command (especially Troubling and Command) is used to condition children according to their place in the caste system. Bernard, who happens to be an expert in the subject, takes a sour sort of pleasure in pointing out whenever someone repeats an aphorism they learned through hypnopaedic induction - complete with listing off the ages at which they must have heard it.

Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Having invented the production lines that produce everything (people included), Henry Ford is retconned by society into a literal Christ-like figure. (And combined with Sigmund Freud.) Played with in that these people were not in and of themselves different or leading some secret life, but were retconned into this by the regime, who needed people to inspire the masses.

Blithe Spirit: Subverted with John the Savage, who gets pitted against a Crapsaccharine World, fails miserably at changing anything, and isn't particularly blithe, either.

Blue and Orange Morality: The new world, according to the Savage (and many readers) - "Mother" is an obscene word, sex is as quick and impersonal as a handshake, and Romeo and Juliet would be considered a comedy. Described In-Universe as an example: When the Savage gets into a discussion with Mond, Mond explains that the reason this world feels so wrong to the Savage is that he is still using the old system of good and evil, as opposed to the modern system of happiness and unhappiness. One of the very few cases in which this trope is done well.

The Beautiful Elite: In the upper castes, everyone is genetically engineered to look beautiful, and they show no signs of aging.

The Chains of Commanding: Mustapha Mond doesn't really like his job as World Controller all that much, but someone has to do it.

Character Filibuster: One chapter near the end of the book consists of a big debate between John Savage and Mustapha Mond on The Evils of Free Will.

Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The caste uniforms.

Conditioned to Accept Horror: Most people have no idea just how vapid and insignificant their lives are. The ones who do know this are so difficult to integrate that they're just shipped off to isolated islands just so they don't have to think about it so much or risk spoiling everyone else's mindless fun.

The Constant: An old, dirty and barely preserved book of Shakespeare, kept in the savage reservation, checked by the only savage that, as the son of a civilized woman, has learned how to read.

Crapsack World: The reservation is a dump with excessive violence and drugs with more ravaging effect than Soma.

Crapsaccharine World: Your options are either a utopia that encourages neglect of individuality, or an exile in a squalid low-technology reservation or a remote island. An attempt to make a society where everyone is treated equally and everything is provided by robots collapsed into civil war within a few years. (Everyone on that island was an Alpha, even though jobs done by other castes in the rest of society still needed to be done; predictably, all the islanders considered themselves above such tasks, they didn't get done, and things snowballed.)

Crapsack Only by Comparison: Native Americans view the "utopian" world of London as immoral, unnatural, and pointless, while Lenina sees John the Savage's home on the savage reservation as backwards, uncivilized, and barbaric.

Creative Sterility: Art without content or substance is what Helmholtz makes, and it's ultimately why he doesn't like the system. Mond also reveals scientific research and development has been purposefully halted for years, the authorities gave him a job as one of the world leader to cheer him up.

Culture Police: Turned completely on their head considering the usual portrayal, but no less stringent about enforcing their particular stripe of morality.

Decoy Protagonist: Bernard Marx. Literature teachers often use him to introduce the concept to students.

Deconstruction: Of the Enlightenment Utopia, and particularly Plato's The Republic. More specifically, the Theme Park Version of Utopia, "where everyone's happy".

Designer Babies: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. In short, pretty much 95% of society with the lower orders even being an inversion.

Deliberate Values Dissonance: There is pretty much no society of today that will ground a four year old boy for not wanting to have sex with some girl. The DHC even comments how there was a time where that would be frowned upon in a they-believed-the-Earth-was-flat tone.

Dirty Coward: Bernard, Henry. The whole society was made so you can simply take a pill the moment trouble arise which doesn't lead to especially brave people but those two sticks out.

Disproportionate Retribution:

Bernard ruins the DHC's career because he wanted to transfer him.

"Transfer" to Iceland amounts to permanent exile without chance for appeal for the heinous crime of being a bit anti-social. Although as Mond explains this is actually a good thing for Bernard since he really can't fit in the dystopia and the alternative would be killing him.

Double Standard: It is clear that, in the novel, sexism is still alive and well. Although the nature of the indiscretions have changed, the exposure of a man's indiscretions merely make him a laughingstock, while his female partner, being exposed, is shunned. In addition, the "dirty words" that describe a woman are much more taboo than those that describe a man, to the extent that a government employee censors them when writing official documents.

Downer Ending: John tried and fails and ultimately kills himself because of it.

Driven to Suicide: John is at the end when he is unable to escape or resist society.

Dystopia Is Hard: But necessary for the greater good, according to Mustapha Mond.

The Evils of Free Will: Mustapha tells about an experiment with an all-Alpha population. It soon devolved into a civil war and resulted in the citizens requesting that the government take back control.

False Dichotomy: Mustapha Mond's experiment in equality fails to be an argument against free will because the experiment seems to have been engineered to fail. The people involved in the experiment were Alphas. They not only had a high intelligence that made them efficient at intellectual work, they were conditioned all their prior life to be happy only with specific jobs. This ensured civil war, because they were literally brainwashed into being incapable of accepting the menial jobs they were shown. Yet no character points this out. If the experiment involved members of all castes, except without the caste system being enforced (allowing castes to interbreed, and take different jobs if they wanted to), or the citizens selected for the experiment were adults who were spared conditioning as children, the experiment could probably have succeeded. The "brilliant minds" who became disillusioned with society and were banished to the world's many islands to do as they please (alluded to at the book's end and explored in Huxley's Island) certainly created what could very well be a viable alternative to "civilization" (with its brainwashing and enforced caste system) and "savage" (poverty- and conflict-ridden) reservations. Thus the presented dilemma between pointless hedonism, civil war, and low-technology reservations, is a false one.

Fantastic Caste System: Different classes of people are produced through embryonic manipulation (specifically oxygen starvation and alcohol poisoning of Delta and Epsilon caste embryos to physically and mentally retard their growth) and the slaves of the lowest class are created to be practically simian (and everyone is psychologically conditioned to accept this ranking, as applied to self and others, as obviously and unquestionably justified).

For Happiness: In a deconstructed way. It's easier to drug and condition people into thinking they are happy than giving them a choice about what makes them happy. Bernard's boss even points out that Alphas have non damaged brain and therefore are smart enough to realize how childish their pleasures are means they have to put more effort into being childish and tries sending Bernard away for not doing it.

Free-Love Future: Played with and deconstructed simultaneously. Everyone is encouraged from earliest childhood to have sex with as many people as possible, and never to form strong attachments to any of them. Chastity is the deadest of virtues. But it's not really "free love", because being promiscuous is mandatory. Sexual norms are just as strict as they were in Victorian times, they just go in the opposite direction. John confuses Lenina by not jumping her bones at the first opportunity; because of this, she ends up longing for him, and comes the closest she will ever come to actually feeling love in her whole pathetic, sex-saturated life.

Friendly Enemy: Mustapha Mond toward the central malcontents.

Future Imperfect: Invoked by the government. No history is taught and texts from before a certain date are strictly forbidden; the few references to the past that come up would appear to our minds to have gone through centuries of misinterpretation. For example, Henry Ford has been conflated with Sigmund Freud, but only in psychological contexts.

Future Slang:

"Ford" has basically replaced "God" and "Lord" in all contexts, resulting in titles like "his Fordship" and exclamations like "For the love of Ford!" The reason is because he created the assembly line, the absolute base of the civilization.

"Pneumatic." This actually was a slang term back in the 1920s, but it's become so obscure that it sounds like Future Slang.
An interesting subversion: in colloquial Finnish, "pneumatics" and "hydraulics" are euphemisms for sex.

Genius Breeding Act: Embryos are created in labs, and people are born into different classes: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon. These groups are engineered to have different intelligence levels both through genetic selection and differences in their artificial fetal environment; for example, an Alpha is made from Alpha gametes and incubated in an optimal fetal environment.

Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: One of the major themes of the book is whether keeping everyone passive and happy is worth eliminating any deeper emotions which could cause conflict.

Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Inverted. Linda is a social outcast for having a baby in a world where in-vitro fertilization is universal, motherhood is an archaic obscenity, and Abortion Centres are luxury facilities.

Government Drug Enforcement: Soma and Malthusian Belts.

Grand Inquisitor Scene: John and Mustapha Mond debating the World State. John argues for a world in which meaningful art, passion, family, and God have a place again, but Mond shoots down everything John brings up. He agrees with him that the old world had more meaning to it, but that it had to be sacrificed for stability.

Happiness in Slavery: Pretty much all of society is conditioned to like exactly where they are. Those at the top enjoy their intelligence, those at the bottom enjoy not having complicated responsibilities, and those in the middle think they have just enough intelligence without having too many responsibilities. The Alphas are perfectly aware of the fact that they're happy with their position because they were conditioned to be, but see nothing wrong with it.

Happiness Is Mandatory: From the in vitro conception to death people are engineered to be constantly happy with what they have and what they do. The secret is in purposefully giving mental retardation to fetuses and drugs.

Heterosexual Life-Partners:

Bernard and Helmholtz.

Bernard seems to see John and Helmholtz as this later on.

Honor Before Reason: John. By the end, he nearly found a third option of a quiet and happy life in seclusion but his commitment to being unhappy meant he couldn't accept it (then the crowds came to gawp at him and everything got worse).

Ignore the Fanservice: John in regards to Lenina. Not that he doesn't want her but he actually wants to court her first.

I Have Many Names: Ford is stated to go by "Freud" in psychological contexts, as if the name were a godly epithet.

At the end, Mond implies that Bernard I Just Want to Have Friends: Bernard. A darker take on this trope than usual-when he does luck his way into popularity, he has no problem abusing it and doesn't mind that it's shallow. will make friends...in exile with all the other malcontents.

Inherent in the System: The brainwashed existence and/or the menial labor.

Info Dump: The reader follows a group of new students through a tour of the Hatchery & Conditioning Center to learn how this society functions.

In with the In Crowd: Bernard after he brings "the Savage" to London.

Ironic Echo: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in it."

Large and in Charge: The lower classes are shorter than the Alphas and Betas.

Justified in that stunted growth is a symptom of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but at the time the book was written, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was not known to exist. Huxley made up a condition that later turned out to be real, and even managed to get the symptoms right.

Bernard subverts this due to being the shortest Alpha, so short that he can look at an Epsilon in the eyes. There are frequent jokes that he got some alcohol put in his gestation bottle.

Leaning on the Fourth Wall: John grew up reading Shakespeare's works, and he's often prone to reading from them while in the "happy society". Since the book's title comes from The Tempest, a Shakespeare work...

Miranda: O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

Live-Action Adaptation: The little known miniseries.

Long Title: An in-universe jazz standard, "There ain't no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine".

Love at First Sight: John for Lenina. Must come from reading so much Shakespeare.

Loving a Shadow: John, who knows romance mostly through Shakespeare and the Reservation, desperately wants to see Lenina as innocent and unavailable, rather than a typical member of her society.

Luxury Prison Suite: Mustapha Mond points out that exile to an island actually means getting sent to the only places in this world where you can find real people instead of the puppet-folk of regular society.

Machine Worship: The future society worships Henry Ford. They even set the calendar by him. Played with inasmuch as "Ford" is a conflation: they simply lump together all those whose inventions and discoveries make their way of life possible. Ford's mechanization and automation policies, Freud's theories of childhood development, etc.

Meaningful Name:

Most characters have names that refer to famous political and cultural figures, like Bernard Marx, Mustapha Mond, Lenina Crowne, Benito Hoover, Darwin Bonaparte and so on.

Also, "Linda" means beautiful.

Memetic Mutation: Invoked as a form of mind control. Pithy little catchphrases (that often rhyme for added catchiness) are spread and invoked as thought-terminating clichés to stop any potential dissent in its tracks.

Murder-Suicide: Implied at the end when John whips Lenina, possibly to death, before hanging himself. Again, might come from reading too much Shakespeare.

My Girl Is a Slut: Henry's attitude towards Lenina, typical of the Alpha caste; when he thinks she already has a date with someone else, for example, he's always excited to know with whom.

My Girl Is Not a Slut: Bernard and John, on the other hand don't like that. John takes it really poorly when she tries having sex right away.

participating in a soma-fueled orgy, and possibly even whipping Lenina to death in the process, retreats to his secluded cottage and My God, What Have I Done?: John, after hangs himself.

Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: John's life is utterly ruined by Bernard bringing him to the "civilized world".

Noble Savage: The trope given form as John the Savage. Subverted by the other members of the Reservation, whose standard of living and way of life are intended to be just as troubling to the audience as the World State.

Older Than They Look: Everyone stays young (physically, mentally, etc.) until their deaths.

One Drink Will Kill the Baby: Lower-caste fetuses are deliberately poisoned with alcohol (and deprived of oxygen) to make them stupid and weak. Notably, this was before alcohol was proven to actually be a poison to fetuses or nursing infants.

One World Order: After numerous devastating wars the remaining government allied each other to do one true order and never go through pain ever again.

Only Six Faces: The Delta and Epsilon classes consist of group of thousands of identical "twins" grown from a single egg. Most evident in the scene near the end of the book, where The Savage comes up against the menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital coming off their shift; hundreds of people but only two faces, one male and the other female.

Peerless Love Interest: Lenina for John.

Pet the Dog: The World State does its best to ensure that even the troublemakers are happy, "exiling" them to the islands where they can be real people in the company of other real people.

Punch Clock Villain: Mustafa Mond actually really likes Shakespeare, pure science and religion, but he has to refuse all of these, because his job to provide happiness for the people demands this.

Raised by Natives: John was raised on a reservation as the whore's son.

Really Gets Around: Almost everyone (since this is the norm), although Lenina is an interesting case. Even though she's quite promiscuous by real-life standards, in-universe she's seen as being as conservative as society will allow. Early in the novel a friend of hers chastises her for going back to the same man too frequently, and John's unavailability causes her to obsess over him.

Reasonable Authority Figure: If only all totalitarian dictators followed Mustapha Mond's example and simply sent malcontents to islands of "normal" civilizations instead of to Room 101...

Reassigned to Antarctica: Well, to Iceland, actually. However Bernard takes revenge on his boss before that happen.

Refuge in Audacity: Literally applied in-universe as The Theme Park Version. The "Savage Reservations" have people who were deemed as unusual and irresponsible while in this new world. If it comes to the point where a person has to be deported, they have the option to pick which island they want to go to.

Repressive but Efficient: Played with. Any free thought is severely frowned upon, and even the most dull and unimaginative person from our time would hate living there, but everyone has a high standard of living, the citizens are insanely happy, and there's no crime. Occasionally someone's conditioning will fail and they'll be a free thinker and unhappy with their lot, but those people aren't punished, imprisoned, or executed, just given the choice between joining the ruling class or going into voluntary exile in an island community of like-minded people, which is relatively humane by dystopian standards. The society is juxtaposed with that of the "savages," who are people who live in a tribal society, and have standards of living that are terrible in comparison, but they are still, for lack of a better word, human.

Robotic Assembly Lines: The book opens with a description of the cloning assembly line.

Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: The Savage versus the technocratic World State.

Sarcastic Title: Everything the new world does is to avoid getting hurt, John even called them out that instead of dealing with hardships they simply gave up by drugging themselves with Soma.

Science Is Bad: Well, a threat to social stability if not kept in check. Pure science, at least.

Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Blatantly invoked by Mustapha Mond when he points out that reading Othello is illegal, but since he makes it illegal, he can still read it if he wants (not that anyone except him and John want to read it anyway).

Send in the Clones: Humanity is mass produced in batches of "identical twins" on the order of hundreds at a time.

Servant Race: The Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons.

Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny: John's fundamental conflict. His traditional values on things such as love and sex clash horribly with those of civilized society, and when he finally gives in to his impulses, he becomes so guilt-ridden afterwards that he hangs himself..

Sexophone: The briefly mentioned sexophones are either renamed saxophones or some odd new instrument. Sex is so blasé in this civilization that a deliberate rename wouldn't be out of the question.

Shout-Out to Shakespeare: The title comes from The Tempest, and since one of John's first books was an anthology from the Bard, he's prone to quoting him.

Miranda: O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in it!

Speaks in Shout-Outs: One of John's first books was an anthology from William Shakespeare, he's prone to quoting him.

Spiritual Antithesis: Huxley would later go on to write Island, a book in which many of the same techniques imposed as control measures in Brave New World's World State can be genuinely beneficial to a society that allows them as options but doesn't force them upon its members arbitrarily.

Stupid Future People: Downplayed. While the masses (Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons) are deliberately made stupid, Alphas and Betas are quite intelligent. However, the intelligent elite are just as shallow and superficial in their philosophical worldview as the stupid people.

Take a Third Option: Bernard and Helmholtz chose this when presented with the "Stability or Freedom" question. The concept itself is not explored in depth until Huxley's later work, Island. Mustapha Mond tells them that he was also faced with this choice, but took a third offer to become a Controller. He regards this as the harder path than going to an island, but more worthwhile. A foreword written by Huxley in 1946 suggests that, given the chance to go back, he might have given John a third option in the end.

Talking the Monster to Death: The book's climax consists of a dialogue between John the Savage and Mustapha Mond.

Theme Naming: All the characters except John the Savage are named after renowned capitalists, communists, industrialists, psychologists, philosophers or scientists. John's behavior indicates he's probably named after the concept of the Noble Savage.

Title Drop: The verse that the book's title comes from is said by John repeatedly.

The Film of the Book: In 1980 (with Kristoffer Tabori and Julie Cobb), in 1998 (with Peter Gallagher, Rya Kihlstedt, Tim Guinee and Leonard Nimoy as Mustapha), and there's another one in the works.

Totalitarian Utilitarian: The story takes place in a society where For Happiness have become such a great cultural obsession that it has become oppressive.

Twisted Eucharist: The Solidarity Services are the Fordist equivalent of the Eucharist. The twelve participants pass around a cup of strawberry ice-cream soma and drink to the Greater Being that will subsume them all. The participants are each seated in a circle between two members of the opposite sex, and are expected to pair up in the culminating "orgy-porgy."

Uterine Replicator: This is how everybody in the World State now gets gestated (they're also clones).

Utopia Justifies the Means: Mustapha Mond's defense of the new world and its ruthless suppression of intellect, creativity and freedom. He genuinely believes the happiness and comfort the world's gained is more than worth it, and makes a scarily strong argument against freedom of choice.

Variant Chess: All the sports available are more complex versions of current ones, like Riemann Tennis or Magnetic Golf-the additional equipment increases consumption.

Villains Never Lie: The protagonists all take Mustapha Mond's story about the Alpha society of Cyprus failing at face value, even though Mond is probably the most Unreliable Narrator imaginable for dictating why a free society of equals can't work.

The War to End All Wars: The Nine Years War, which happened roughly 500 years before the start of the novel.

Well-Intentioned Extremist: Mustapha Mond recognizes that individuality, creativity, and self-awareness are lofty and noble things. He also believes that sacrificing them in the name of stability, order, and banal happiness is necessary to preserve human civilization.

We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: The trick is, while everyone is healthy and youthful, their bodies can survive this treatment to no longer than around the age of sixty. Savages grow old, but they can also luck out to have much longer lifespan.

We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The lower (read: intentionally retarded) castes. Justified; they've got the technology to make a great deal of that work obsolete and in fact tried just that, only to find out that it made people unhappier. It's better to give the Epsilons somewhere to go and something to do for 8 hours, so labor-saving technology was intentionally dialed back to create more make-work. As for why they didn't just stop breeding/manufacturing the lower castes and let a society of free, intelligent humans operate the labor-saving devices themselves: they tried that too, and the island they tried it on collapsed into civil war within a couple of years; it turns out that the higher castes need someone to boss over and will not do anything that they feel is beneath them.

What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Wanting to be with one person? Caring if your partner is with someone else? Minding when someone dies?! What hilarious concepts! Well, assuming you're not a Native American on the reservation.

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A 1932 dystopian novel written by Aldous Huxley. Quite possibly the only serious Western Dystopia involving too much happiness... as provided by the totalitarian state. In the future, most of humanity and the environment people live in has been ...

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Google's AlphaGo AI, the one that just repeatedly dominated the world's top Go players, uses what's called a Monte Carlo tree search function to decide its next move. Each "branch", or decision, in that tree has a weighted value that's determined from previous experiences and the relative rewards associated with them. This is known as "reinforcement learning" and is basically the same way you train a dog: rewarding effective behavior and discouraging the ineffective.

This obviously works well for dogs (all of whom are good) but it does present a significant shortcoming when training neural networks: the AI will only pursue high reward actions no matter what, even to the detriment of its overall efficiency. It will run into the same wall forever rather than take a moment and think to jump over it.

The UC Berkeley team's AI, however, has been imbued with the ability to make decisions and take action even when there isn't an immediate payoff. Though, technically, the researchers define curiosity as " the error in an agent's ability to predict the consequence of its own actions in a visual feature space learned by a self-supervised inverse dynamics model."

To train the AI, the researchers taught it to play Super Mario Bros. and VizDoom. As you can see in the video below, rather than blindly repeat the same high value action over and over again, the system plays more like people do with the same basic understanding that there's more to the game than the wall immediately in front of them.

"In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether," the study's authors wrote. "In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that might be useful later in its life."

The implications of this are immense. We've already got Google training neural networks to design and generate baby neural nets, researchers at Brigham Young University teaching them to cooperate, and now this advancement enabling AI to teach itself. The pace at which artificial intelligence is getting smarter and more human-like is accelerating. Best of all, it shows no signs of slowing down.

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UC Berkeley researchers teach computers to be curious

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Google's AlphaGo AI, the one that just repeatedly dominated the world's top Go players, uses what's called a Monte Carlo tree search function to decide its next move. Each "branch", or decision, in that tree has a weighted value that's determined from previous experiences and the relative rewards associated with them.

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A New Book: What May be the Effects of Artificial Intelligence in the future? 

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A New Book: What May be the Effects of Artificial Intelligence in the future? 

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Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark | PenguinRandomHouse.com

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How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology-and...

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Reading Huxley in Huxley's Home in Hollywood

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Reading Huxley in Huxley's Home in Hollywood

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A book club finds modern connections with the ideas of the author at his home.

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Seated on a veranda high in the Hollywood Hills, a few book clubbers who had gathered to discuss Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" in the author's last Los Angeles home craned their necks.

They weren't peering at the softening evening sky or at the Hollywood sign, which loomed so close it looked like white plastic lawn furniture, a prop to rest a drink on. The occasional helicopter had already torn past, momentarily drowning out voices ("a humming overhead had become a roar," as Huxley describes their sinister advance in the novel's climactic scene) but that hardly merited a pause in conversation.

No, during a deep-dive into one of literature's most compelling dystopias, someone had spotted a drone.

True, surveillance is the territory of a different literary dystopia, George Orwell's "1984," but for a moment, the intrusion felt eerie. Was it watching us? And what would Huxley have made of a drone hovering over his roof?

Because a book club at Huxley's house held the romantic promise of somehow connecting to the author more deeply, we were looking for him everywhere.

A reader in attendance, Hiawatha Bradley, ventured that the opiate of the masses "just has to be technology," adding, "your brain is wired to the phone." Alex Hoffmaster drew a parallel between social media and "Brave New World's" drug Soma, which keeps society numbly happy and subservient. The dopamine hit of a text alert, the Pavlovian thrill of a retweet, are modern addictions. Was that Huxley's prescience reaching across the veil? A brave new world indeed.

Discussing "Brave New World" after dark. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

A next-level book club

How did roughly two dozen people find themselves in the unique situation of discussing "Brave New World" at the home of the author? Never underestimate the power of a book club.

This particular group, which is based in San Francisco, has been around for less than two years and often brings in authors to discuss their work, including Jade Chang and Laura Albert (the real JT Leroy). They had scientists from Berkeley's SETI research center weigh in on Chinese writer Cixin Liu's science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem."

When the chance arose to take up "Brave New World" in the very house where Huxley lived, which is owned by a friend of book club organizer Sarah McBride, it was time for a pilgrimage. Bay Area members flew from Oakland to Burbank, and a number of locals rounded out the party.

"To be discussing the book in a place that was significant to the author," said McBride, felt like "an extra-special tribute."

Aldous Huxley. (Associated Press)

Huxley's Los Angeles

Huxley moved to Los Angeles in 1937, five years after publishing "Brave New World." He worked as a screenwriter, studied Vedanta Hinduism (with fellow British expat Christopher Isherwood) and famously became an early proponent of psychedelic drugs, which he wrote about in "The Doors of Perception."

"L.A. at that time must have been like Paris at the turn of the century," mused book club member Aida Jones as a three-tiered fountain gurgled from the other end of a spacious patio. Huxley moved here after his previous home in the canyon had burned down in a 1961 wildfire.

This was the house where, on his deathbed, Jones announced, "his wife gave him a shot of LSD to his throat." It was somewhat discordant to think of Huxley expiring on the premises while nibbling book-club fare like cheese doodles and salami, but we were there, after all, with a purpose, and it was clear that people had a lot to say.

The ruins of Aldous Huxley's former home on Deronda Drive. (Los Angeles Times)

Today's new world

McBride moderated the roundtable discussion, which touched on the maternal bond and authentic attachment, Christian allusions and even the role of scent in the novel, but returned again and again to Huxley's striking prescience.

Huxley was on the mark about "our appetite for reality television," said Steven Wong; Jones added that "he foresaw the birth control pill." Rocket travel, genetic engineering, virtual reality, antidepressants and even the Kardashians were all argued to find precedent in the novel.

But the moors of his era had prevented him from imagining one kind of social change.

"It's a pretty sexist world," said Geoffrey Fowler. Josh Levine agreed: Huxley "could imagine so much, but he couldn't imagine equality." Kate Connally, who'd been passing out the evening's "soma" (white wine), thought Huxley's lead female character Lenina "deserved a deeper portrayal. She'd be played by like, a Katherine Heigl in a Judd Apatow movie," she said.

Joshua Levine holds a copy of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Searching for Huxley

McBride mentioned a couple of rumors about Huxley's promiscuity later in life. "So, when he lived here?" asked Connally. A few people giggled. It was one of the few times the fact that we were at Huxley's former home was addressed directly. Later, when Miryana Isabella Babic alluded to a "theory that part of the house is haunted," and McBride offered to show me the room where Huxley died, I felt voyeuristic but eagerly said yes. Huxley - a half-blind Englishman, ever in the musty suits of an academic, at 6 feet 4 towering over the rest of us both physically and intellectually and towering, to some extent, over dystopian fiction - maybe I'd get a sense of him there. It was dark at this point, the hills across the canyon an inky black.

I shuffled into a bedroom, tastefully decorated, and felt nothing. No spirit of Huxley lingered. Luckily his work is easily found.

It had been a wonderful novelty to talk about a book he'd written in a home where he'd lived, and though the conversation was erudite and discussing works of art is vital, there's no closer connection that I know of - across decades, even death - than the page. I'd taken "Brave New World" out from the library for a refresher; it "Brave New World" was waiting at home on my couch.

"The strange words rolled through his mind;" he writes of his tragic hero, John the savage, discovering poetry for the first time. "Rumbled, like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken ... beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried ... because it talked to him; talked wonderfully and only half-understandably, a terrible beautiful magic."

Yes, there he is. There.
agatha.french@latimes.com @agathafrenchy

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Reading 'Brave New World' in Aldous Huxley's former home

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Seated on a veranda high in the Hollywood Hills, a few book clubbers who had gathered to discuss Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" in the author's last Los Angeles home craned their necks. They weren't peering at the softening evening sky or at the Hollywood sign, which loomed so close it looked like white plastic lawn furniture, a prop to rest a drink on.

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Article Explanation of the Epilogue/Ending Notes 

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Article Explanation of the Epilogue/Ending Notes 