Dystopia Stolen

Due to the ideas found in his books, especially Brave New World, Aldous Huxley is often believed to be a creative genius. However, the original creators behind many of the ideas within the pages of that book are actually H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. Biologically engineered caste systems, emotionless pleasure employed to maintain social stability, and extreme control methods are themes found throughout Men Like Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau, A Modern Utopia, and When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells and The Scientific Outlook and Icarus by Bertrand Russell.

By looking at the original publishing dates on the books of Huxley, Russell, and Wells, one would probably be led to think that it was the latter two who stole ideas from the former one. When it is considered, however, that they were often in conversation together and that Wells and Russell had publicly discussed their ideas long before Huxley did so, it is apparent that the author of Brave New World took those ideas from them. In fact, Huxley admitted to beginning his novel as a parody to Wells's Men Like Gods and made no secret of his criticisms of the utopian novel, though it is questionable exactly how much of a parody he was planning to write, since both books warn against any society that prefers uniformity to individuality and they incorporate many of the same situations with the same literary and emotional effect. Wells was "deeply offended by Brave New World," knowing that his former friend attacking him was at least partly unjustified (Firchow, "Wells and Lawrence" 261). In both The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man, Wells writes of the disaster which scientific pursuit without regard to morals brings about and though he often writes of utopias, these were fantasy novels rather than serious ideas of the future. In that way, Russell is different from both Wells and Huxley; in The Scientific Outlook, he actually advocates establishment of a society much like the one Huxley describes and fears. Even Russell, though, agrees that science alone cannot create a perfect society. Virtue and morals must take some small part.

The social caste system in Brave New World is a particularly critical aspect of the book because it outlines an inequality seen both at the time of authorship and today in order to bring the reality of the future to the readers. The system is reliant on what Bertrand Russell called in his book, Icarus, "biomedical means of destiny control" to stabilize their Fordian society, a hierarchy produced by genetic manipulation to create different classes of people with varying degrees of intelligence (Firchow, "Science and Conscience" 310). The order of classes in Brave New World flows from Alphas, the most intelligent and physically able, to Epsilons, the most handicapped in intelligence and in size, with Betas, Gammas, and Deltas between. In the story, a lower-level Epsilon is described as being "a small simian creature dressed in a black tunic" (Huxley 58). This is probably a reference to Bertrand Russell's suggestion in The Scientific Outlook that "negroes would occupy the bottom rungs" of the social order, comparing African-Americans to monkeys (Ironside 280). H.G. Wells also employs a method of genetic manipulation to create caste systems in his book Men Like Gods and even uses what he calls an International Crиche Syndicate to teach young members of society exactly what is expected of them, a close parallel to Huxley's Conditioning Centers. It appears that the social caste system Huxley creates is really a mixture of ideas from Russell and Wells that fit nicely with one another.

Emotionless pleasure employed to maintain social stability is another element evident in the books of all three men. In Brave New World, the people of the Fordian society engage in meaningless sex and take a drug called soma to keep them from becoming unhappy under any circumstances. People go into coma-like states for days at a time on the drug to escape from an unpleasant reality. Sometimes they even perform what are similar to religious services, incorporating the drug and sex with random partners. Wells also imagined a world in which people have constant pleasure, including meaningless sex, to avoid the emotions that would cause instability within the society, both in Men Like Gods and When the Sleeper Wakes. In the latter, the main character is repulsed by the sexual advances of promiscuous women when he enters what are called Pleasure Cities, much like the savage from Huxley's novel is when he encounters Lenina and the Fordian society. The main character from Wells's novel also refuses, like the savage, to alter his personality by consuming chemical substances. The idea is that complete pleasure with no emotion attached creates a stable society in which everyone is happy, which is also what Bertrand Russell envisioned in The Scientific Outlook. Of course, Russell truly believed that the "elimination of all that is tragic from human life" would actually be effective in maintaining social stability and that science would someday achieve that, probably through chemical means (Firchow, "Science and Conscience" 307).

Control methods, an idea popular with