The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication — the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production — also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. With the new technology, distances grew suddenly shorter and true privacy rarer. While people in industrialized societies welcomed these advances, they also worried about losing a familiar way of life, and perhaps even themselves, in the process. The nightmare vision of the fast-paced but meaningless routine of Brave New World reflects this widespread concern about the world of the 1920s and 1930s.
The period also brought a new questioning of traditional morality, especially regarding sex. Dress, language, and especially fiction expressed a greater openness for both women and men in their sexual lives. Some hailed this change as the beginning of true individual freedom, while others condemned it as the end of civilization itself. Huxley, with typical wit, uses the issue for irony, creating an image of the young Lenina being scolded for her lack of promiscuity. Sexual rules may change, Huxley tells his readers, but the power of convention remains the same.
Although set in the future, then, Huxley's Brave New World is truly a novel of its time. At a period of great change, Huxley creates a world in which all the present worrying trends have produced terrible consequences. Movement toward socialism in the 1920s, for example, becomes, in Huxley's future, the totalitarian World State. Questioning of religious beliefs and the growth of materialism, likewise, transforms into a religion of consumerism with Henry Ford as its god. And if Model T's roll off the assembly line in the present, in a stream of identical cars, then in the future, human beings will be mass-produced, too. Huxley's future vision, by turns witty and disturbing, imagines the end of a familiar, traditional life and the triumph of all that is new and strange in the modern world.
