This cheerful horror is at the centre of the novel, and this first sentence begins to establish the central tone: we see through eyes that do not perceive the magnitude of what is before them. So complete is the indoctrination that almost nobody thinks twice about the implications of the system they're told straight out that they've been engineered for contented submission from their test-tube conceptions, and they don't think anything much of it. But the state does not even do this in secret it happily acknowledges it and boasts of its success. The inhabitants of this new world do not ask - do not even question - what has been done to them. all streamlined along with a program of conditioning to make this a world of blissful contentment for its victims. The essence of Brave New World is to present a world soullessly mechanised, filled with inhabitants who are ruthlessly institutionalised: brain-damage to foetuses who might otherwise be bored at the menial jobs they are destined for, communal raising and hypnotic sex education designed to break down the possibility of intimacy or passion, consumerism and shallowness the ultimate virtues. We are, in other words, in a world that is both hostile and filled with citizens who see no hostility therein. and yet populated by people who can be expected to shrug off this mammoth edifice as nothing much. Either is an environment calculated to daunt even the most forward-looking reader: overbearingly urban, utterly out of human scale. Is it called 'squat' because the narrative voice, or at least the characters it invokes, judges entirely on its lack of floors - that is, does the building look like a contemporary skyscraper? ( Brave New World was first published in 1932 New York had been able to boast of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings for a couple of decades, making them a feature of life well placed to occupy speculative fiction: new enough to be notable, old enough to be familiar to everyone.) Or is it thirty-four storeys high and still squat judged by contemporary proportions? The former invokes a city of mountainous needles reaching into the sky the latter a city with buildings of gargantuan size - and in both cases, a rather sterile and ugly place where the buildings are grey and unattractive.
Most obvious is the mimicry: thirty-four storeys merits an 'only'? The image is at once visual and conceptual, pulling us with delicate uncertainty between the two.
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