The brave new world of Huxley's novel is not a "good place," and so it is not, in the strictest terms, a utopia. Huxley himself called his world a "negative utopia," the opposite of the traditional utopia. Readers have also used the word "dystopia," meaning "bad place," to describe Huxley's fictional world and others like it.
Huxley's dark view of the future opened a new door in fiction and seemed to revive interest in the old traditional utopian form by giving it a modern edge. George Orwell's Animal Farm (1946) and 1984 (1949) build on the energy and meaning of their predecessor, Brave New World. In Fahrenheit 451 (1950), science fiction writer Ray Bradbury proposes a future society without history or literature, a dystopia of which Huxley's World Controller Mustapha Mond himself would probably approve.
In the 1960s, Anthony Burgess imagined his own futuristic London in A Clockwork Orange, rehearsing the themes of control and the loss of self introduced by Huxley. And Huxley's disturbing views of science and technology have even echoed in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), where the anti-hero, wandering the streets of London during the V-2 raids of World War II, discovers his own dark history of social (and sexual) conditioning.
