03/10/2025
How could I not follow up 1984 by not taking it a step further back and going through this gem. Overall I think it’s a good book, but boy is it a mixes bag of experience. I can say I wasn’t a fan of the head hopping in the beginning. Don’t get me wrong, the conveyer belt system for embryo handling was fantastic, probably my favorite part of the book, but the mechanism used to demonstrate the programming was clunky. I think the problem was, story was happening in-between and that just made it really hard to track.
I heard some people didn’t like the end as much, but, I think it was absolutely fitting. If you plan on reading you shouldn’t continue on reading my comments, but I think the important part of the end is after Linda died, John was left to himself and Shakespeare. I felt the tragedy of his ending fit his outlook on life that was based on the plays he read and the only escape for him that made sense. I thought how the rest of the people around him handled what happened as absolutely brilliant, because they behaved relative to their programming. For me, Lenina was the bridge that brought it all together in the middle. When she is trapped in the bathroom scared of John as he is going crazy. Books like this really demonstrate how programming works. I’d say the only other part that I struggled a bit through was the huge amount of telling by Mustapha near the end. It was a big info dump.
In terms of my own writing, I think the influence I get from this is the solidification of mob dynamics is societal programming. I deal with that theme with one set of people in my book that a rigid in their ways. When you are so programmed you don’t understand other responses available for circumstance, it’s as if the response is almost child like because there has been no problem solving allowed in the mind of these people. They literally become paralyzed by just not knowing how to respond with no reference in their training.
