I have not read Brave New World; neither am I likely to. Otherwise, I'm fairly deep in the works and thought of Aldous Huxley; prizing above all his many wonderful little monographs (essays, if you will) on anything and everything that occurs to him, but also liking extremely: After many a Summer Dies the Swan, Crome Yellow, Eyeless in Gaza, and of course, The Doors of Perception. I've tried several times to read BNW; invariably giving up somewhere between the twentieth and the fortieth pages--unable to bear the ugliness of its premises: Why not make everybody Alpha++'s? What is this notion of the inevitablity and desirability of class? Derived as it palpably is from the world's first and deadliest dystopia (Plato's Republic), why not "consign it to the flames therefore," as the stupid, utterly unprofitable bad idea that it is and always has been? So I missed how Huxley creates his gamma and epsilon classes by slightly poisoning their developing fetuses in vitro with alcohol. Both Douglas and Timothy, severally determined to fill this gap in my reading, have both been coming up to me lately expostulating on the wicked wisdom of this tiresome classic of modern literature. And so I have learned that Huxley understood all about the social significance of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome--and the creation of the witless Lower Classes--in a lucid, scientific way which Williams Hogarth and Blake had only known empirically and intuitively. But there it is: The line direct, from the gin-swilling whores of 18th Century London to Benny Hill.