Brave New World - Chapter One
One
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the
words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE,
and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABI-
LITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for
all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself,
a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped
lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass
and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded
to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with
a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from
the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living
substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak
in long recession down the work tables.
“And this,” said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing Room.”
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Di-
rector of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely bre-
athing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed
concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow,
followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried
a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled.
Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central
London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round
the various departments.
“Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them. For of course some
sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently-
though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as
possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virture and happiness;
generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers
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and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
“To-morrow,” he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality,
“you’ll be settling down to serious work. You won’t have time for generalities.
Meanwhile .”
Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebo-
ok. The boys scribbled like mad.
Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a
long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking,
by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was
hard to say. And anyhow the question didn’t arise; in this year of stability, A. F.
632, it didn’t occur to you to ask it.
“I shall begin at the beginning,” said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students
recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. “These,”
he waved his hand, “are the incubators.” And opening an insulated door he
showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. “The week’s supply
of ova. Kept,” he explained, “at blood heat; whereas the male gametes,” and
here he opened another door, “they have to be kept at thirty- five instead of
thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes.” Rams wrapped in theremogene beget
no lambs.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried il-
legibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process;
spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction- “the operation undergone vo-
luntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus
amounting to six months’ salary”; continued with some account of the tech-
nique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed
on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to
the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his
charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn
off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially war-
med slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected
for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he
now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm
bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa-at a minimum concentration
of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten
minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined;
how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if
necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where
the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Del-
tas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo
Bokanovsky’s Process.
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“Bokanovsky’s Process,” repeated the Director, and the students underlined the
words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud,
will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will
grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult.
Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.
“Essentially,” the D.H.C. concluded, “bokanovskification consists of a series
of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically
enough, the egg responds by budding.”
Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.
He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was en-
tering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly
purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight
minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died;
of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some
eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop;
then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four,
eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost
to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded-bud
out of bud out of bud-were thereafter-further arrest being generally fatal-left to
develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming
anything from eight to ninety- six embryos- a prodigious improvement, you
will agree, on nature. Identical twins-but not in piddling twos and threes as
in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide;
actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
“Scores,” the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were dis-
tributing largesse. “Scores.”
But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
“My good boy!” The Director wheeled sharply round on him. “Can’t you see?
Can’t you see?” He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. “Bokanovsky’s
Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!”
Major instruments of social stability.
Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory
staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
“Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!” The voice
was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. “You really know where you are. For
the first time in history.” He quoted the planetary motto. “Community, Iden-
tity, Stability.” Grand words. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole
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problem would be solved.”
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of
identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.
“But, alas,” the Director shook his head, “we can’t bokanovskify indefinitely.”
Ninety-six seemed to be the limit; seventy-two a good average. From the sa-
me ovary and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many batches
of identical twins as possible-that was the best (sadly a second best) that they
could do. And even that was difficult.
“For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But
our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Drib-
bling out twins over a quarter of a century-what would be the use of that?”
Obviously, no use at all. But Podsnap’s Technique had immensely accelerated
the process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty
mature eggs within two years. Fertilize and bokanovskify-in other words, mul-
tiply by seventy-two-and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers
and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years
of the same age.
“And in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen thousand
adult individuals.”
Beckoning to a fair-haired, ruddy young man who happened to be passing at
the moment. “Mr. Foster,” he called. The ruddy young man approached. “Can
you tell us the record for a single ovary, Mr. Foster?”
“Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre,” Mr. Foster replied without hesi-
tation. He spoke very quickly, had a vivacious blue eye, and took an evident
pleasure in quoting figures. “Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred
and eighty-nine batches of identicals. But of course they’ve done much better,”
he rattled on, “in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced
over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the
seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should
see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It’s quite astonishing, when
you’re used to working with European material. Still,” he added, with a laugh
(but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging),
“still, we mean to beat them if we can. I’m working on a wonderful Delta-Minus
ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand
seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going
strong. We’ll beat them yet.”
“That’s the spirit I like!” cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on the
shouder. “Come along with us, and give these boys the benefit of your expert
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knowledge.”
Mr. Foster smiled modestly. “With pleasure.” They went.
In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of
fresh sow’s peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little
lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-
hatches hew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap,
insert, smooth-down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of
reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot
up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that
slow interminable procession on the band.
Next to the Liners stood the Matriculators. The procession advanced; one by
one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers; def-
tly the peritoneal lining was slit, the morula dropped into place, the saline so-
lution poured in. and already the bottle had passed, and it was the turn of the
labellers. Heredity, date of fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group-
details were transferred from test-tube to bottle. No longer anonymous, but
named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening
in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.
“Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index,” said Mr. Foster with relish, as they
entered.
“Containing all the relevant information,” added the Director.
“Brought up to date every morning.”
“And co-ordinated every afternoon.”
“On the basis of which they make their calculations.”
“So many individuals, of such and such quality,” said Mr. Foster.
“Distributed in such and such quantities.”
“The optimum Decanting Rate at any given moment.”
“Unforeseen wastages promptly made good.”
“Promptly,” repeated Mr. Foster. “If you knew the amount of overtime I had to
put in after the last Japanese earthquake!” He laughed goodhumouredly and
shook his head.
“The Predestinators send in their figures to the Fertilizers.”
“Who give them the embryos they ask for.”
“And the bottles come in here to be predestined in detail.”
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“After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store.”
“Where we now proceed ourselves.”
And opening a door Mr. Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement.
The temperature was still tropical. They descended into a thickening twilight.
Two doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar against any
possible infiltration of the day.
“Embryos are like photograph film,” said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed
open the second door. “They can only stand red light.”
And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was
visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon.
The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted
with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of
men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum
and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.
“Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster,” said the Director, who was tired of tal-
king.
Mr. Foster was only too happy to give them a few figures.
Two hundred and twenty metres long, two hundred wide, ten high. He pointed
upwards. Like chickens drinking, the students lifted their eyes towards the
distant ceiling.
Three tiers of racks: ground floor level, first gallery, second gallery.
The spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into
the dark. Near them three red ghosts were busily unloading demijohns from a
moving staircase.
The escalator from the Social Predestination Room.
Each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you
couldn’t see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third
centimetres an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day.
Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar
at ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the second, and on the two hun-
dred and sixty-seventh morning, daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent
existence-so called.
“But in the interval,” Mr. Foster concluded, “we’ve managed to do a lot to them.
Oh, a very great deal.” His laugh was knowing and triumphant.
“That’s the spirit I like,” said the Director once more. “Let’s walk around. You
tell them everything, Mr. Foster.”
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Mr. Foster duly told them.
Told them of the growing embryo on its bed of peritoneum. Made them tas-
te the rich blood surrogate on which it fed. Explained why it had to be sti-
mulated with placentin and thyroxin. Told them of the corpus luteum extract.
Showed them the jets through which at every twelfth metre from zero to 2040 it
was automatically injected. Spoke of those gradually increasing doses of pitui-
tary administered during the final ninety-six metres of their course. Described
the artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at Metre 112; showed
them the resevoir of blood- surrogate, the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid
moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste
product filter. Referred to the embryo’s troublesome tendency to anæmia, to
the massive doses of hog’s stomach extract and foetal foal’s liver with which, in
consequence, it had to be supplied.
Showed them the simple mechanism by means of which, during the last two
metres out of every eight, all the embryos were simultaneously shaken into
familiarity with movement. Hinted at the gravity of the so-called “trauma of
decanting,” and enumerated the precautions taken to minimize, by a suitable
training of the bottled embryo, that dangerous shock. Told them of the test
for sex carried out in the neighborhood of Metre 200. Explained the system
of labelling-a T for the males, a circle for the females and for those who were
destined to become freemartins a question mark, black on a white ground.
“For of course,” said Mr. Foster, “in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely
a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve hundred-that would really be quite
sufficient for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And of course
one must always have an enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as
thirty per cent of the female embryos to develop normally. The others get a
dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course.
Result: they’re decanted as freemartins-structurally quite normal (except,” he
had to admit, “that they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards), but
sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last,” continued Mr. Foster, “out
of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting
world of human invention.”
He rubbed his hands. For of course, they didn’t content themselves with merely
hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.
“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human
beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future .” He was
going to say “future World controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future
Directors of Hatcheries,” instead.
The D.H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile.
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They were passing Metre 320 on Rack 11. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was
busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing
bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he
turned the nuts. Down, down. A final twist, a glance at the revolution counter,
and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same
process on the next pump.
“Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,” Mr. Foster explained. “The
surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer inter-
vals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen- shortage for
keeping an embryo below par.” Again he rubbed his hands.
“But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?” asked an ingenuous
student.
“Ass!” said the Director, breaking a long silence. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that
an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon
heredity?”
It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.
“The lower the caste,” said Mr. Foster, “the shorter the oxygen.” The first organ
affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal
oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
“Who are no use at all,” concluded Mr. Foster.
Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could discover a
technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph, what a be-
nefaction to Society!
“Consider the horse.”
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually
mature; and is only full-grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed
development, the human intelligence.
“But in Epsilons,” said Mr. Foster very justly, “we don’t need human intelligen-
ce.”
Didn’t need and didn’t get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten,
the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous
and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it
was as quick, say, as a cow’s, what an enormous saving to the Community!
“Enormous!” murmured the students. Mr. Foster’s enthusiasm was infectious.
He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination IDPH 13
which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account
for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the indivi-
dual Epsilon embryo be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality
of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.
Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature
at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially use-
less. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work.
And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or
else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal com-
promise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr.
Foster sighed and shook his head.
Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neigh-
borhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed
and the bottle performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel,
interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide.
“Heat conditioning,” said Mr. Foster.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort
in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had
a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner
and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be
made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. “We condition them to thrive on
heat,” concluded Mr. Foster. “Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love
it.”
“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness
and virtue-liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making
people like their unescapable social destiny.”
In a gap between two tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine
syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle. The students and their
guides stood watching her for a few moments in silence.
“Well, Lenina,” said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe and
straightened herself up.
The girl turned with a start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the purple
eyes, she was uncommonly pretty.
“Henry!” Her smile flashed redly at him-a row of coral teeth.
“Charming, charming,” murmured the Director and, giving her two or three
little pats, received in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself.
“What are you giving them?” asked Mr. Foster, making his tone very professi-
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onal.
“Oh, the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness.”
“Tropical workers start being inoculated at Metre 150,” Mr. Foster explained to
the students. “The embryos still have gills. We immunize the fish against the
future man’s diseases.” Then, turning back to Lenina, “Ten to five on the roof
this afternoon,” he said, “as usual.”
“Charming,” said the Dhector once more, and, with a final pat, moved away
after the others.
On Rack 10 rows of next generation’s chemical workers were being trained in
the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two
hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven
hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in
constant rotation. “To improve their sense of balance,” Mr. Foster explained.
“Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken
off the circulation when they’re right way up, so that they’re half starved, and
double the flow of surrogate when they’re upside down. They learn to associate
topsy-turvydom with weli-being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re
standing on their heads.
“And now,” Mr. Foster went on, “I’d like to show you some very interesting
conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack
5. First Gallery level,” he called to two boys who had started to go down to the
ground floor.
“They’re round about Metre 900,” he explained. “You can’t really do any useful
intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails. Follow me.”
But the Director had looked at his watch. “Ten to three,” he said. “No time for
the intellectual embryos, I’m afraid. We must go up to the Nurseries before the
children have finished their afternoon sleep.”
Mr. Foster was disappointed. “At least one glance at the Decanting Room,” he
pleaded.
“Very well then.” The Director smiled indulgently. “Just one glance.”