Summary of this chapter:
The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The year is a.f. 632 (632 years “after Ford”). The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is giving a group of students a tour of a factory that produces human beings and conditions them for their predestined roles in the World State. He explains to the boys that human beings no longer produce living offspring. Instead, surgically removed ovaries produce ova that are fertilized in artificial receptacles and incubated in specially designed bottles.
Function:
The first chapter of the novel gives an impression of the philosophy of the new citizens and is in fact an enumeration of stunning scientific achievements which make it hard to distinguish between what is more valuable: human beings or technologies.
Within the description of the technologies and the environment Huxley indicates how life is in this new society and how unimportant the individual human is. Here the novel repeatedly draws allusions from the creation of humans to the production of goods for men can and will be replaced when they are not needed anymore or are produced when they are.
In order to fill this moral and ethical frame the author invented a perfect society which is based on technology and is aiming for stability.
Huxley praises the new 'World State' with its systems to preserve stability through the character's speech but the reader figures out in no time how much of a satire of glorified science and how dystopian these achievements actually are. Also the reader comes to the conclusion that this society -as presented in this first chapter- really is stable but knows that something will go wrong because this might not be what he longs for...
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'So long as there are men, there will be wars.'
-Albert Einstein
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