I've just finished Huxley's Brave New World. It's the last of the dystopian novel triangle of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 I needed to read and I think it's the best of them. I found the world of BNW far more believable and sinister than Orwell or Bradbury's simply because it doesn't portray the ruling elite being evil for its own sake. There is a faintly terrifying familiarity with the leisure-and-drug-drenched world where people are more than happy to sacrifice freedom and liberty for happiness and short-term relief.
The plot itself is less well-organised than the other two, but it helps capture the feel of a world warped by drugs and social conditioning. Unlike 1984, it knows not to labour the point and wraps up neatly before you can get too bored with it.
My biggest problem with Brave New World was that the writing was terrible. Huxley created a world both fascinating and frightening, but his descriptions of said world were hampered by his complete and utter lack of writing talent. It wasn't quite as bad as, say, Tom Clancy's writing, but it was still pretty bad.
I have to agree with this (except the Tom Clancy part, he I think is a fine writer even if his stuff does tend to plod along sometimes and he does get a bit bogged down in the technical details).
Brave New World was a fascinating concept poorly executed, in my opinion nowhere near the quality of
1984 or
Fahrenheit 451. I've read
1984 like five times since first reading it for school. It used to be my favorite book.
As far as bleak futuristic dystopias go I'm not sure it gets any better than
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I just read for the first time a couple weeks ago. So profoundly disturbing, and I actually found that the more I reflected on it after I was done reading it the more disturbing it seemed. There was a lot of unsettling subtext in that book. I guess it remains to be seen if it holds up that way for me after some time has passed, but I have a feeling I'll be reading that one again.
And also speaking of political thrillers (I know, it's a weak segueway but whatever) I just got done reading
The Bourne Supremacy. Certainly Robert Ludlum was a better writer than Clancy. Of what I've read so far his stuff
never gets boring, and the story in that and
Identity is
just plausible enough that I am able to gleefully suspend my disbelief while I'm reading it, while at the same time being ridiculously exciting enough that it feels like the literary equivalent of a thrill ride.