Genetic engineering is quickly becoming more a matter of ethics than science. The idea of ‘test tube babies’, as they were once called, has morphed into the valuable process of in vitro fertilisation.

Huxley’s book does not, partly because the technology he envisioned as wild and improbable is already here in many ways. Orwell’s message of the government controlling thought and distorting facts through language resonates more potently than ever today. Huxley’s message, of course, was that sameness crushes free will and imagination, leading to even greater unhappiness than before.Ĭlassic though it is, Brave New World has never had the cultural grip of that other anti-totalitarian warning from the era, George Orwell’s 1984. Everyone is blissfully happy thanks to happiness pills called Soma. Alphas are smart and privileged Epsilons are dim-witted worker bees. Sameness reigns, in a world where babies are engineered in factories and assigned grades according to their status. Like the book, the series is set in a dystopia disguised as a utopia. The boredom sets in early on and never goes away in the splashy new adaptation of Brave New World, based on Aldous Huxley’s then-futuristic novel, published in 1932. When even the orgies are dull, you know a television series is in trouble.

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