the island

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You may remember Aldous Huxley from such public school assignments as Brave New World and SOMA.

I've been thinking about the state-raised-baby aspect of BNW, so when I saw The Island on the $ .48 cart I was curious enough to start reading it.

I had some respect for Huxley on the basis of his non-fiction Doors of Perception, about LSD experiments...I remember thinking as a teenager that BNW had some frightening predictions about THE FUTURE. I guess reciently I started realzing that (to quote Joe Neff's Drexel Grandview sci-fi marathon t-shirt) THE FUTURE really IS history.

The Island has some interesting arguments about the nature of god and humans...I've been reading it on the subway on the way to work. It's a bit confusing with not much action and lots and lots of what is the word...dogma? pedantry? preaching? I don't know what I'm saying here.

It's a bit preachy, i guess...well informed but preachy...not unsual for utopian literature i suppose. I was wondering aloud to Krishna the other day about what impact Huxley's books have had in the US. I suspected that public acceptance of his ideas has increased greatly in the last 50 years. Krishna thought not.