At 8:43 AM -0400 15/12/2000, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
><serious>
>Something I just remembered.
>
>Aldous Huxley was very pissed off because _1984_ became more
>famous/important/serious/(something else) than his major
>opus _Brave New World_.
He also lost a rather astonishing position in English literature of which I
was unaware for quite some time, and only found out about recently.
Apparently old Huxley was generally considered right up there with Virginia
Woolf and a couple of other modernist writers in English. Huxley was
actually highly regarded by mainstream English literary critics until,
well, he started writing about drugs and stuff like that. After that, both
his work and SF in general fell away from that set of interests, and it
took until the 70s for much critical interest to resurface in SF in general
litcrit.
>His argument was that any state
>powerful enough to control the whole humanity would soon
>invent a drug like the _Soma_ [IIRC] to make everybody happy.
Or, more close to what Huxley wrote, to keep everyone *stupid*,
*distracted*, and *effectively content*.
>He was wrong.
I guess you don't own a TV? :)
>... but even those power-hungry tyrants like Saddam
>Hussein dedicate a small thought to the future of his
>family.
Which is not to say that we are all that well-equipped by our societies to
think about the future in any useful way, or that their thoughts are
anything we would want to see realized -- neither from Hussein nor Bush
Jr. nor Chretien, for example.
></serious and back to Tymbrimi mode>
Yikes!
