Huxley Buxley's Brave New World

25 January 2026

Huxley Buxley’s Brave New World

Let me be completely transparent, here: I am writing this book review today because I am midway through composing a 6000-word short story, and I am procrastinating the hard work of the climactic moment. I’ll do it tomorrow. This will be a bite-sized effort by comparison, ideal for launching back into my writing practice since setting it aside a whole week ago. Sometimes we must have compassion for ourselves when we fall out of our practices, right? Slide in slowly. An apropos analogy, as I sit at my writing desk overlooking an icy lake.

Ok. So I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—already on my shelves, originally read perhaps in 2005, a little baby 25-year-old me—because I am deeply interested in integrating it into my Comp II (ENGL 1120) class for required reading, as it relates to my new-fangled Big Question for the class: How do social media and generative AI impact thinking and learning?

I read it also because Middlemarch and Bleak House were slow reads and I needed a break. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to be a three-sit read. The pages flew fast. The writing itself is so simple a middle-schooler could enjoy the story, and the plot is propellant.

What I think most remarkable, most dystopian, about the plot thematically is the erasure of history. Just this morning, I stumbled across a post on Instagram (yes, like the rest of us I need my “feelies” and my “soma” to dissociate from the dystopia in which we live) by the account @lit.by.adam (please feel free to check him out—I don’t yet follow but after this post will consider doing so), where Adam writes (with both Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm appearing next slide):

“Unless you have been living under a rock, you can clearly see the thread of authoritarian regimes in every direction, no matter where in the world you live. And what do authoritarian regimes absolutely hate? Reading.

They attempt to ban books, lower funding for libraries and schools, manipulate curriculums [sic] to skew the knowledge of history, and do their utmost best to stop people from thinking critically for themselves. A society that doesn’t read is a forgetful society, and a forgetful society easily lets the same horrors repeat time and time again.” [Emphasis mine.] (lit.by.adam Slide 6)

Of course, such an erasure of memory is precisely Mustapha Mond’s intent with his people in Brave New World, as he reveals in conversation with John Savage at the end of the novel. Mond explains that his people should never read the Bible or learn about God because,

“‘—Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.’

[…]

…civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.’” (237-8)

Indeed, Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, tells the Alpha Pluses early in the novel that history is unimportant—that it must be forgotten,

“‘…you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,’ he repeated slowly, ‘is bunk.’

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather wisk [sic], he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk—and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom—were all gone. Whisk—the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk.” (34-35)

While our current situation feels less like government than corporate mind-control and erasure of the readers who might carry forward our past, perhaps this too is insightful, as in Brave New World government and industry are one and the same (people are encouraged by hypnopaedia (sleep memorization) to consume and consume as a manner of driving the economy and ensuring economic stability).

In any case, lit.by.adam’s point is well-illustrated in Huxley’s dystopia. Huxley understood the value of reading in retaining history—and therefore our agency and democracy.

All of this textual evidence clearly points back to my Big Question of how social media and AI impact thinking and learning. It’s almost too obvious to even write “out loud” here, but I will anyway: social media and generative AI, by eroding our attention spans and capacity to engage in long-form deep reading, will rob many of the ability to carry forward the histories and moral lessons relayed in books. This may have critical consequences to society and governance. We may be placated as we are stripped of agency.

Ok. Waving hand at that to whisk it away. We’re done here.

What I really want to talk about is a more roundabout way that Huxley thumbs his nose at generative AI: his creation of neologisms and portmanteaus—the original vocabulary introduced in his novel.

Now, of course, I do understand that LLMs and GenAI did not exist while Huxley was alive. Nevertheless, his representations of technology 600 years in the future is astute. Most Alpha Pluses own their own helicopters, which they fly from rooftop to rooftop. All babies are reproduced artificially in test tubes—some produced as sets of twins numbering up to 96 identical human beings.

Yet somehow, interestingly, Huxley could not imagine a machine taking over our language. Even the scripts whispered into babies’ ears during hypnopaedia can be found on paper scrolls stored in pigeon-holes all along the nursery walls. The only copies of books are tattered and kept in Mond’s personal locked safe; no audiobooks or digital books to be found anywhere.

As an instructor who receives my fair share of LLM-created student writing, what I am seeing most lately is that students will submit an assignment, get accused of employing GenAI, and then claim that they never used it—that their writing is their own. First of all, to me this is an indicator of the student’s illiteracy when it comes to GenAI; they are using it without realizing they are using it because it is so deeply and ubiquitously ingrained in their word processing applications. But that aside.

What Huxley does with neologisms and portmanteaus is provide a lesson in language play and creative writing: if you make the language your own, you will never ever be accused of using Generative AI to write for you—right? The way LLMs work is by placing one word after another according to what is most probable in its language model. This means that an LLM will ostensibly never place words in an order that is entirely unique. Moreover, it will never ever use words that are made up, like neologisms and portmanteaus.

Let’s pause. What are the definitions of these words according to Merriam-Webster.com?

Neologism: a new word, usage, or expression.

Portmanteau: a word or part of a word made by combining the spellings and meanings of two or more other words or word parts (such as smog from smoke and fog).

Ex: A portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” cosplay by definition is the act of dressing up as a fictional character, with many of the costumes you find inspired by video games, film, or TV.—Stephanie LaCava (Merriam-Webster.com)

What are some portmanteaus and neologisms found in Brave New World? Here’s a little list:

• Soma: a psychotropic drug that produces no aftereffects/hangover

• Orgy-porgy: exactly what it sounds like, a sex party

• Hypnopaedia: sleep learning

• Feelies: movies where people go to sit in a somatic chair and “feel” the plot

The list goes on…but these will suffice. My favorite is the word hypnopaedia, which is both a neologism and a portmanteau of the words hypnosis and paedia (Greek for learning).

Making up words is something we all do, whether we realize it or not. Between myself, my husband, and my children, we probably have a made-up vocabulary of at least 100 different words. We cannot be alone in this. I’m convinced that most human relationships and households do this. Indeed, every new generation does this! Want evidence? What the heck are the words “sus” and “cap,” anyway? Creativity in language is innate!

This is a great lesson for my students: if you want to avoid being accused of employing GenAI for your writing, either to compose or polish your work, learn to play with the language. Learn to have fun with it. Choose sentence structures that startle in their differences. Make up words—so long as your reader may understand their meaning. Play with things like alliteration and rhyme, even in your prose! The best way to appear the least mechanistic in writing is to embrace your human creativity at the sentence level, like Aldous Huxley—something an LLM could never do.

I feel the truth of this but simultaneously know that the best way to avoid being accused of using an LLM to compose or polish your work is to become AI literate. My students really just need to learn where the AI is creeping into their writing process whilst they are unaware.

Bottom line: Huxley’s Brave New World serves well as a piece of long-form fiction that speaks to the impacts of social media and generative AI on human thinking and learning. The fact that it was written in 1932 only makes it that much more credible, as it presents this issue through a historical lens: this issue is not new, and we should be wary of reliving history.