Bernard and Lenina bring John and Lina back to the World State. John talks about how he was an outcast because of his mother’s promiscuity in the village, which was a result of her conditioning. They are also surprised to find a fair-skinned lad named John, who leads them to his mother, Linda, who they later found out is the woman that the Director lost when he went to the Reservation. Bernard goes to the Reservation with Lenina, and they are surprised to find that its people are sick and aging, two things that the World State has eliminated. Right before leaving for the Reservation, Bernard learns from Helmholtz that the Director is planning on exiling Bernard. The Director tells Bernard about how he traveled to the Reservation years earlier and lost a woman in a storm who was never found. Bernard must receive a permit from his boss Thomas, the Director of the factory. Bernard is interested in travelling to the Reservation, an area in New Mexico that shows what life was like before the establishment of the World State. Another worker at the factory, Lenina Crowne, is sexually interested in Bernard. He also disagrees with many World State values like his fellow Alpha, Helmholtz Watson, who works as a lecturer. Bernard is slightly shorter and less attractive than the normal Alpha Plus, so he often views himself as an outsider. The story follows an Alpha Plus named Bernard Marx who works at the factory, called the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre. The pharmaceutical industry has developed the perfect drug, called Soma, that most of the population is constantly under the influence of, and is always readily available. Apart from the caste system, the World State Society has eliminated all religion and established a religion heavily based on sex, and encourages people to be very promiscuous. In the first few years of life, each caste is conditioned differently to fulfill their respective roles in society. The lower the caste, the more the embryos are deprived of oxygen and exposed to alcohol to cause physical and intellectual defects. In the factories, the embryos are subject to certain conditions based on what caste system they are meant to be a part of and where they are meant to live. Women no longer give birth, and embryos are grown in factories. The castes, from highest to lowest, are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. In Huxley’s view of what the future could look like, the society is based on a strict, five-part caste system. In the novel Brave New World, writer Aldous Huxley explores what a not-so distant future could look like, based on many current trends. Some have predicted that technological innovation will define the future, while others have focused more on what current societal inequalities could evolve into. Many authors have speculated what the near future could look like through their works of fiction.
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