This book, written in the early 1930's, is about life 600 years in the future. Science has made it possible for everyone to be happy by eliminating things that cause sadness. There is no such thing as family, since while family can bring joy, it can also bring a lot of pain and suffering. Babies are produced from harvested ovaries and in test tubes with conditioning being done throughout to produce the class characters necessary to properly populate society. Father and Mother are crude ideas that are scoffed at and a person can "have" another person any time. Paring off with only one person for an extended period of time is extremely frowned upon.
Then introduced into the story is a savage. He is the son of a uper classman who is accidently born when his mother gets lost on a visit to a reservation where they keep wild people (people that live in families and live off the land in the parts of the world the new government doesn't feel it is worthwhile to dominate) When his true identity is discovered he is brought into the real world and the rest of the book is basically the clash between the modern and the traditional.
The most fascinating part of this is how much of what Huxley describes about technology and ideology actually has happened in the last 70 years. In fact, things are happening faster than the book predicts. It basically paints a picture of what the world will look like if traditional values are all eliminated in the pursuit of happiness by eliminating pain and suffering.
I thought the book was excellent. It was well written and provocative.
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