Brave New World Summary by Shmoop

Brave New World, a la Shmoop. My name’s John, and I’ve always been a little… different. At first, it was my skin color. I grew up on a savage reservation and, well, when you’re white… …I guess they associate you with those guys who keep flying in to ogle them like zoo animals. This is the year 2540. Most people live in a magical, fantastical future-land… …where babies are born in factories, grow up in strict social castes… … and take happy drugs and have tons of sex so that they don’t have to think about how much their lives suck. I mean really, these people are a perfect anti-drug and sex campaign. They make pills and *** look totally unappealing. I was supposed to be one of these future folk, but my mom got lost on a weekend getaway from civilized land. Then my useless dad left her there, and… well, it turns out she was pregnant with me. One day, my life changed completely. We get a visitor from the civilized world that’s not a total robot. His name’s Bernard, and he’s like me. A little… different. Nobody likes me because I’m white, nobody likes him because he wants to actually fall in love. When Bernard finds me, he realizes that my mom’s story sounds awfully familiar. Turns out his jerk director lost his lady on a savage reservation years ago. So Bernard decided to bring his boss back a little souvenir…. …in the shape of an abandoned son. Surprise! See, I’m a huge no-no in civilized land because you’re not supposed to feel love and have sex and create your own little bundles of joy… like me. That would be savage. So now it’s happily ever after, right? My mom and I have been freed from the savage world, Bernard has been freed from his sucky boss… ….but hold up. Turns out it’s not all that easy in civilized-land. The whole bringing-down-the-big-boss incident makes Bernard so popular that he becomes a fame-hungry zombie… …Oh, and even in the civilized world they can’t get rid of girl trouble. See, I was in love with Bernard’s friend, Lenina... But she was very…forward. She really wanted to, uh…love me. Right away. Like, NOW. But while I could see how screwed up everything was, all the civilized folks were out in Happy-Loopy-Space-Ville drugged out on their escape mechanism of choice… soma. Including my mom. And she kept not living her life… until she died. They don’t have families here. Nobody understood why I cared when she died. They were all sliding down rainbows or riding unicorns or something. And boy, they were not happy when I dumped their supply of magic drugs out the window. At this point I was getting pretty fed up with the civilized world. I ran away to live in an abandoned lighthouse where I could be a miserable hermit. My routine in the lighthouse went something like this: Wake up. Don’t shower. Don’t eat breakfast. Violently flog yourself. Check to see if self-abuse has lessened burning desire for Lenina. Repeat as needed. But man, these future-people will not leave a guy alone! It’s like, as soon as you decide to do things a little differently from the pack, you involuntarily sign on to be your own reality TV show… …like The Bachelor, only with more guilt and self-loathing. When everyone started watching, they turned my flogging into exactly the opposite of what it was: sexy. Lenina came by and I was so mad I started flogging her… …and then they started flogging each other, one thing led to another aaaaand… …giant ***. The next day when I woke up and remembered what had happened the night before, I couldn’t live with myself anymore. The future isn’t always bright.