The Circle

The Circle
2013 Dave Eggers
507 pages

Sharing is Caring.

Privacy is Theft.

Secrets are Lies.

Imagine an internet transformed by a company  so innovative and ambitious that it had swallowed Facebook, Google, etc. whole.  It began with TruYou, a common login that allowed people to use one login for virtually everything online, from their hobbyist forums to their bank accounts.  It ends....well, that's up to you and me. The Circle combines 1984 and The Social Network to present a dystopia-in-the-making,  one most users of internet service will recognize in their own habits. Funny and alarming,  it's easily the most riveting novel I've read this year.

The Circle as a novel begins with the arrival of Mae, a frustrated twenty-something to the customer service desk of the company. As the novel progresses, her willingness to adopt to the Circle culture and work hard to perpetuate it,  take her to the heights of power, to the company's own inner circle. Readers witness her transformation as she grows to ignore the concerns of her ex-boyfriend and her parents that something isn't right about the world the Circle wants to build.  At the center of the Circle are the Three Wise Men -- a reclusive young genius,  a charismatic public face, and an avaricious  financier.  Between the three of them, they want to bring about a techno-utopia by allowing for -- and even mandating -- total transparency.  The Circle isn't just a social network/search engine/marketplace on steroids, it's also an Apple-esque technology company that produces new tools -- tools like small, discrete cameras that allow for live-streaming from multiple locations. The network and its tools grow throughout the novel to allow for technocratic control of society:  child abductions are thwarted by chip implants,  politicians begin wearing bodycams to prove they aren't sitting in smoking rooms hatching conspiracies, and neighborhood watch programs alert residents every time a non-registered person enters their block. Mae's own ascent into the elite happens when  she leads a campaign to turn the Circle political, to make its platform a voting mechanism. When one person drives off a bridge to get away from the Circle, their response is to wistfully say that would have never happened if we could make everyone give up automobiles that aren't self-driving.

The Circle is both warning and dark comedy, mocking compulsive users of social networks while building a threat that is more ominous than hilarious. In an early scene, Mae is called into her supervisor's office to resolve a serious dispute between her and another coworker -- one she has never met, but who invited her to a party for kindred hobbyists, and one who was deeply hurt when she never responded, not even to say "Sorry, no can do".  The world of the Circle demands constant interaction, constant attention, constant sharing.  It's not enough to go to after-work parties: there have to be pictures, shares, tags, likes, and tweets about the party. Mae first approaches her position like a nine to five job; she does her work, she goes home or goes kayaking, she returns. This is not the Circle way. The Circle's social demands  are such that some people simply live on campus, and even when they leave, the idea that they've left the Circle is almost blasphemous. Mae went kayaking....by herself? She didn't tell everyone she was going so they could send her Smiles, and worst of all...she didn't record anything. No one can benefit from her experience except from Mae!  What selfishness.

Although I have my doubts about how effectively this novel could happen (the NSA has problems with storage and cooling, and it's not coping with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous camera feeds),  Eggers' novel makes obvious two dangers of the growing social network apparatus. First, there are people whose histrionic obsession with social media make them not far removed from Circlers. Two, the role that some companies have as web infrastructure -- principally Google,  with its search engine, browser, cloud storage, email, control of YouTube and blogger --  poses a threat to free communication. Google is not a neutral actor; it has an agenda and does not brook dissent, either external or internal.  Facebook is no less threating to privacy; the reclusive genius used in The Circle is a transparent clone of Zuckerberg, complete with hoody.   The greatest problem shown by The Circle is what happens when these two factors combine -- the needy child-mob on social networks, and the infrastructural control they rely on and enabled.

For what it's worth: I maintain a Wordpress copy of this website in case Google ever gets really nefarious.

Related:
4 Alternatives to Google

Future Crimes

Future Crimes; Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It
Paperback subtitle: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World 
© 2015 Marc Goodman
608 pages

"It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."  (Q, ST TNG)

 The future is arriving more quickly than we think,  the world being re-formed beneath our feet. Ten years ago, the fact that a presidential candidate was glued to his ‘BlackBerry’ was an oddity;  now, smartphones are the very way we interface with our environment.   The transformation of the world from material to digital is total, providing new avenues for the darker instincts of  mankind to exercise themselves alongside entertainment, commerce, and education. Future Crimes is an astonishing review of the myriad of ways that this brave new world is making us not only more productive, but more vulnerable to malicious attack – and offers insight into the dangers we will face tomorrow.  This is a book without  rival.

 Goodman writes as a law enforcement official who specialized in cyber security as computers left warehouses to become basic infrastructure. Now, after decades of experience, he shares extensive research and personal encounters with the reader. He begins by treading familiar ground at first, by reviewing  the state of overwhelming exposure people now live in. As learned in Data and Goliath, virtually everything we do generates data that is collected and evaluated by someone, whether it’s our phone company keeping a history of where our phone travels, apps within the phone transferring our information to marketing agencies, or our interactions with the online world being monitored and recorded, as Google sifts through our email – and our websearches, and our YouTube viewing history, and our web activity on Android and Chrome – ostensibly to sell ‘better ads’.   It's not just Google, of course: facebook is another major data distributor, but practically every website that depends on adspace is complicit.

 Adding to this, however, is the threat of outside attack: criminal elements corrupting apps or creating their own to collect data for more malicious purposes, like emptying our bank accounts – or entities across the globe, looking for secrets.  The fact that a person is an American or German national won’t stop Chinese companies from having an interest in their personal business if they are involved in technical enterprises of interest.   Blueprints of the US president’s personal aircraft, for instance, were obtained by the Chinese after a defense worker’s laptop was infected with targeted malware.  It’s not just smartphones, either: as computers undergird our very homes, surveillance no longer requires a group of fictional plumbers poking around installing cameras into  ceiling fans.  These days, even the power outlets can have ears.

 Data collection isn’t just a problem for privacy issues: the concentration of so much information invites crime.  When heist extraordinaire Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied simply – that’s where the money is. Why penetrate Target’s databanks? That’s where the information is  --  high-value credit card information.   The exposure isn’t all about profit, either, though the information superhighway has already helped far-distant predators steal and skedaddle. The early hackers practiced their craft for laughs, and so they still do – but the odds at stake are higher than simply wiping out computer drives.   Future Crimes documents one case of a young teenager whose laptop was infected with software that allowed an outside party – a teenager at her school who was not even reasonably clever, but purchased a kit – to  turn on her webcam,  collect photographs of her in states of undress, and then attempt to blackmail and humiliate her. Even after she switched schools,  the photos became the arsenal of bullies there,  their hounding continued after a failed suicide attempt, and eventually ended only when she succeeded in killing herself.  Secure in anonymity, able to meddle in the lives of others from safety, humans are willing and capable to do all matter of wretched things.

The fun will continue as the 21st century develops. Our digital world is in its infancy, a mere golf ball of connectivity compared to the solar-sized scale of tomorrow.  In the years to come,  it is possible that most every object in our home will be connected to an internet of things, and even if paranoiacs and luddites like myself object, regulation and market availability may force some level of IoT integration.  The systems that control our lives – traffic management, electrical grids, financial markets – are managed online, and each of them has already been tampered and manipulated by tech-savvy hoods.  As the world continues to become more automated,  services performed by machines running on software that can be manipulated,  our danger grows.  Military drones have already been touched by malefactors – insurgents can watch a drone’s feed as it approaches, or skew its navigation so that it blows up the wrong neighborhood. (Assuming it had the right neighborhood to begin with...)   Manufacturing robots have already proven themselves lethal,  sometimes mistaking human laborers for parts to be manipulated, and if their software is tampered with, accidents could be effected on purpose.

Future Crimes is a daunting, eye-opening book.   Even after reading other books on cyber-security,  Goodman provides case after case I hadn’t heard of. This is five hundred pages of disturbing reporting and evaluation,   dense and powerful.   Like any security auditor, Goodman doesn’t leave readers shocked but helpless: the last fifth of the book offers some ideas into protecting ourselves.   Part of the problem is that culture has not caught up to technological change yet: as smartphones ease  un-informed adults into the digital world, people unprepared for vigilant defense of their information expose themselves to a burgeoning number of thieves and opportunists.   Not even those who should know better are ready; many of the instances document here come from military or security officials not being fastidious enough, with the result that a virus intended for an Iranian offline network traveled to the International Space Station.   In addition to arguing for regulations that force private enterprises to take more fiscal responsibility for safeguarding the information they collect,  Goodman shares more interesting ideas, like crowdsourcing better digital security systems.

Two things are certain: we’re in for a ride in the next decade, and I won’t find a more eye-opening book this year.  This book delivers reams of eye-opening information. It would make for an interesting exposure of crime merely by itself,  but goes beyond that to brief readers on the multitude of security challenges we face now, and will face tomorrow, threats to our personal, corporate, and national security.  Future Crimes is well worth your time: it, and the world it opens one's eyes to, are incredible.

Related:

• Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier
• The Internet Police, Nate Anderson
• Spam Nation, Brian Krebs
• 10 Don'ts On Your Digital Devices,  Eric Rzesut, Daniel Bachrach
• @ War, Shane Harris

I have a few more titles in this vein that will appear later this year, like Richard Clark's Cyberwar and Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide.  They may succeed, but they won't surpass....

The Internet Police

The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online (and the Cops Followed)
© 2014 Nate Anderson
 310 pages

 Not since the steam engine has the world been so utterly transformed than by the Internet. Originally a military network, it is now infrastructure, undergirding modern life to a degree only surpassed by electricity.The internet is not just a physical construct of tubes and boxes; it is a social world unto itself, one created by its users.  Like every aspect of society, the internet has its dark alleys,  Mos Eisley-like havens of villainy. The Internet Police takes readers on a ridealong into those alleys, exploring the world of internet crime -- and internet policing.

The Internet Police opens with a chapter on the difficulties of imposing order in the first place. In the first chapter,  the author shares the joint scheme of an enterprising cyberlibertarian, Sean Hastings, and a presumably lunanical bootleg radioman turned king of his own private island, Roy Bates. The latter took over an English gun platform from WW2, declared it his personal fiefdom, and defended it with a shotgun before settling down to eake out a living taxing seagulls and the like. The former, who decided what the world needed was a secure place where servers could host the materials respectable governments banned (like online casinos and pirating), proposed renting space in the platform.  The thing was virtually inaccessible (har har), but could connect to British web infrastructure fairly easily. The adventure didn't work out terribly well, however, as Bates had an itching for respectability and a penchant for being dictatorial, neither of which allowed him to coexist with the pirate-haven for too long.

After concluding from the collapse of HavenCo that even a freeform place like the web needs law and order, Anderson reveals how the same has been enacted, despite the internet serving for both an extension of preexisting crime and the opportunity for new ones. Take sexual harrassment, for instance, which has been liberated from bars and dimly-lit parking garages. Computer mics and cameras,  some integral to the machines themselves, can be converted into the eyes and ears of tech-savvy voyeurs.  Readers may be familiar with trojan-horse style malware that uses seemingly innocuous bits of software, downloaded unsuspectingly through email or updates, which then  install and activate programs that can record keystrokes or open the machine up for remote control. Malicious use is not limited to petty lechers;  Collection agencies may use the software to obtain photographs of an unpaid-for computer in use, but their agents -- proving that all power in human hands is liable to be abused --  are recorded here using it to leer at and blackmail customers who were caught in a state of nature before the camera. Police officers using the same means succumb to the same ends.

While collections companies and perverts may invade others' computers with the primitive justification, "Who's gonna stop me?", the police are an altogether different story.  In an ideal world, they are to be accountable to the public and its law. Part of The Internet Police is a history of the myriad of ways the government has attempted to rein in the internet first through laws that allow for what is still called "wiretapping", despite the fact that it now consists more of  integrating police software with internet service providers' to scrutinize information being sent and received from a given IP address.  Governments also strong-arm telecommunications companies,  forcefully suggesting that they build in 'backdoors' to their devices and networks to allow Uncle Sam or the Crown to easily find out what a given gadget is up to.  The NSA specializes in such backdoors.  Courts as well as the police can be used to take down 'criminals', although here Anderson's review is limited to the seemingly endless attempts by music companies to prosecute consumers for file-sharing.  Unlike going after the programs themselves (Napster being the most famous, with Limewire and Kazaa other heavyweights), these campaigns rendered only a lot of bad publicity.

While there's a lot of digital crime not mentioned here (pirated video games and DRM, identity theft), The Internet Police is a fast read and one that opens up a fascinating peek into how the internet is continuing to reshape the world we live in.  Opening with the utterly bizaare story of Sealand and serving up legal thrillers in miniature, it entertains while serving as a heads up as to how vulnerable we are using unsecured systems.

Related:
New York Times article, "Spyware vs Spyware: Nate Hood's Internet Police"
Der Spiegel article (English), "Shopping for Spy Gear"
CBS is about to air a cybercrimes show that has my interest: CSI: Cyber.

Player Piano

Player Piano
© 1952 Kurt Vonnegut
352 pages

"I'd be in exile now, but everywhere's the same..."

     Not since the roaring twenties was American society so giddily obsessed with newfangled stuff than in the 1950s.  Americans were awash in material prosperity, filling their homes with labor-saving devices -- the future had arrived, buddy-boy, in gleaming chrome and with automatic controls. While some starry-eyed futurists looked forward to a world in which machines took care of all of the dirty work and left humans free to paint, compose, and ponder the mysteries of the cosmos, others saw a darker vision.  Player Piano casts a critical eye against the future machines might create, where mankind lingers in despair not from want of food, but want of purpose.

In this world, the entire economy is automated by massive plants of machinery, one per city, and so extensive is machining that most of the  population is functionally idle. Aside from an infinitesimally small group of people with jobs machines cannot usurp (among them, bartenders and barbers offering a friendly ear), the only truly employed people are the managerial elite, who run the machines and think up new ones.

Vonnegut escapes being predictable in that the misery of his novel is not a luddite view of poor, starving wretches denied wages because machines do their jobs more effectively. Indeed, the standard of living for Americans, from an economic point of view, has never been better. Taxes on capital support most of the population, who can have a world of consumer good before them for pennies. Their homes are filled with miraculous wonders that make our laundry machines and ovens look like Franklin stoves and washboards. Yet for all their material prosperity, the characters throughout the book are deeply miserable. The masses huddle in bars, drinking and talking about the good ol' days, when a man's work was worth something, while management tends to its machines and seeks relief from tedium in petty office politics.  

Main character Dr. Paul Proteus is a late-blooming reactionary; having been accepted by the managerial class, indeed being one of its most promising up-and-comers, he finds no satisfaction in his work and often steals over into the other part of town to sit in a bar, drink, and listen to chatter. Eventually he becomes a key figure in a revolution against the machines, as disgruntled people attempt to seize control of their lives again, to restore dignity and purpose to their work.

Player Piano is one of Vonnegut's earliest works, but for me the most poignant.  There are obvious marks of a writer beginning his craft;  the seams as Vonnegut switches from character to character are rough, and the revolution lacks a lot of dramatic punch.  Vonnegut's essential vision, however, has never been more potent;  there are many elements of the story that seem prophetic, but Vonnegut's predictions are more chilling than those of 1984's or Brave New World's because his world is so ordinary, not nearly as removed from our own as are those two dystopian classics. Player Piano's modernity is Plato's republic, realized in full, with the Machine set as the ultimate ideal form. People are judged by this ideal their entire lives long;  nothing matters except for the economy, and the computer analyzes them and determines their place within the economy, and by extension within society.  They are constiuent parts serving it.  In our own world,  even those applying for a job in fast food must submit to lengthy psychological assesstments of dubious merit, which are graded by no one but a machine, and whost will not even managers can contest.  We are beholden to systems that not even the operators understand fully, and no aspect of life escapes being reduced to the machine's standardized level.

In the end, the revolution of Player Piano is one against anomie and emasculation, an attempt to restore the striving to life. It provokes questions. How close are we to Player Piano's despair? How engaged in our lives are we?  Do we Live, or do we merely exist, producing and consuming -- does the work of our hands makes a difference? It is difficult these days not to be overwhelmed by the machine. We rely on them for entertainment, for sustenance, for validation. But people don't simply want to be administereds, clients of some system;  this race that conquered the world is filled with restless energy that must find some creative outlet, and  our souls contain greatness that cannot be contained by chronic subservience. Man yearns to be free, to act independently, to be the agent of his own prosperity.  It is a yearning ignored in Player Piano, and increasingly overlooked in our own world  of automated cars, canned music, factory food,  and a state that wants to take care of everything.

Ultimately, Player Piano is less a triumph than a tragedy, an ominous suggestion of the world to come.

Related:
The Sea Wolf, Jack London, with a similar theme of man's actualization in striving against the world on his own merits
Technopoly, Neil Postman, whose work was mentioned prior
Average is Over and The Glass Cage, two recent works on automation and social stratification by Tyler Cowan and Nicholas Carr
Compendium of the Social Doctrine, which calls for meaningful work.

Divergent

Divergent

© 2011 Veronica Roth

487 pages

Every major city has problems with organized gangs, but the Chicago of Divergent’s future has nothing else. The entire society is organized in five factions devoted to an ideal;  Dauntless, Abnegation, Erudition, Amity, and Candor. These five subcultures prescribe virtually every aspect of life; occupation, manners, dress, and living quarters.  Every year, on their sixteenth birthday, young people submit to a test that informs them which faction best suits their personality. A rare few defy this sorting serum, however;  they are Divergent, and their very existence is taboo. Such is the premise of Divergent, a young adult sci-fi thriller that succeeds in  thrilling despite some problems.

 Our lead character and hero is Beatrice, soon to be called Tris. Tris has been raised by the  semi-religious Abnegation, who strive for selflessness and are trusted with the governance of society. Beatrice, soon to be called Tris, loves her family’s ways but can’t help but feel she doesn't  belong there. When her inconclusive test results giver her the option of choosing, she bolts factions and becomes Dauntless. Her new faction, the society’s warriors and guards, place a premium on battle skills and ferocity.  Most of the book is taken up with Tris training for initiation; if she fails, she will be homeless.  Considering that the training involves teenagers violently sparring with one another (with the occasional knife thrown),  and the  plot eventually ends in rebellion against an establishment reigning with the machinery of the state,  little wonder it has been compared to The Hunger Games.

 Unlike The Hunger Games,  the insurrection is not one of the oppressed against an oppressor, but of one sect against another, manipulating  others to do its bidding. The Erudite, who are less wise  here than presumptive elites,  think little about society being run by simpering religious folk. They intend to seize power through sinister technocracy,  and Tris soon finds her allies as against her as everyone else.  Though she prevents catastrophic defeat, her victory is necessarily minor given that there are two more books in the series. Divergent is a touch more risqué than The Hunger Games, and not nearly as violent (yet).  The premise is contrived, especially when the primary danger of being Divergent is that such individuals pose a danger to the exact technology and plot used by the Erudite to start their coup.  Either the Erudite have been scheming this for a very long time,  Divergency is dangerous for other reasons, or that was a boo-boo.  The entire intellectuals vs. virtuous religious angle is obnoxious,  and the villains are more flatly Eeeeeeevil than one would expect for a teen audience. The ever-sympathetic challenges of a young person being removed from the safety of childhood and having to adapt to a new environment and new people provide a familiar story with plenty of excitement, with some exploring of moral horizons thrown in.  In my view Divergent’s best virtue is the value placed on family; while its society urges that Faction comes before family,  Tris  uses the lessons learned from her parents to help guide her transition into her own brave new world, and later relies on their help in the coup. 

Problematic but fun, Divergent is best for older tweens and teens.

Related:

• "Profession", Isaac Asimov.  In a future society where people's professions are assigned to them by a testing computer, one man finds himself at a loss when he is declared un-assignable. 
• The Hunger Games, obviously.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

© 2008 Suzanne Collins
 378 pages           

 Once every year,  two teenagers are chosen at random to represent their region in a nation-wide game….the Hunger Games. But they’re not competing in track and field or spiking volleyballs to earn metals:  they’re fighting to the death. And you thought high school sucked.

The Hunger Games is the first in a science-fiction trilogy set in a dystopia future wherein the United States is gone, replaced by a country known as Panem. Its central city, Capitol, is rich beyond measure, and rules with an iron hand twelve outlying districts, all impoverished. There used to be thirteen districts, but when it rebelled against the state the insurrection was brutally put down…and to ensure that no other district bucked the reins again, Panem instituted the Hunger Games, forcing two kids from every district to compete against one another, fighting one another until only one survives.

Katniss Everdeen is a voluntary contender in the games, fighting so that her young sister Primrose doesn’t have to. She is, in effect, taking a death sentence: the odds are long that she will prevail among the 24, because other, wealthier districts train their children for the yearly games and see them as a place to earn wealth and glory.  Katniss’ home, District 12, is a poor mining area: they see the games for what they are, the murder of children for the glorification of a malevolent state. But Katniss is up to Capitol's challenge. Orphaned by her father and functionally abandoned by her mother,  she shouldered the burden of  responsibility for herself and her sister, defying the laws to hunt secretly in the woods bordering her district and bringing home food for her family . It takes courage to live outside the law, but Katniss is determined to survive. That, and the survival skills she's learned pacing the woodlands in search of prey,  are her best hope.

The Hunger Games is not a happy story. It is brutal and intense, both in terms of action and the emotional turmoil readers joining Katniss will go through. The physical challenge is daunting enough:  Katniss is not only compelled to fight against 23 other teenagers abandoned in the woods, having to provide her own shelter and food, but the Capitol authorities, the “Gamemakers”, constantly imperil the contestants,  altering the weather and sending monsters to harry the tributes. The young people create alliances to survive, but temporary physical advantages carry their price: it’s a lot more difficult to kill a friend, and a lot easier to be killed by someone you regard as an ally.

Happy it isn't, but The Hunger Games proved more compelling than I expected it to be. Katniss is an indomitable central character, feisty and self-reliant. She never whines, and though she has vulnerabilities she doesn't waste time dwelling on them.Other characters, like the mysterious Rue and the brooding Peeta, prove able additions to the cast. She's easy to root for, even when forced to make difficult decisions. And happily for a teen novel, there's not a lot of dwelling on romance -- although it does factor in, and will become more important in the sequel.  

This is essentially a story about courageous young people in harrowing circumstances, attempting to survive not only 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', but the Capitol's attempt to destroy their own sense of humanity. It's a fast, thrilling read, peopled by strong characters whose maturity gives the lie to the conflation of adolescence and silliness. 

           

Brave New World

Brave New World

© 1932 Aldous Huxley

270 pages

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman introduced the book with his suspicion that Brave New World's predictions were coming to fruition -- namely, that human happiness will be pursued by destroying human culture, or to put it in more ironic terms, all that makes us human. It's a book you've probably heard of: I was introduced to it through a Star Trek novel. The story is set in the future, where Earth is controlled by the World State, which dominates the lives of its wards. Every human institution you know and love -- or despise-- is gone. Even the most basic, the parent-child relationship, has been removed: the opening chapter has a group of teenagers being taken on a tour of a hatchery. As the guide gleefully tells the story of how human beings come to be in this world, she also explains how the World State arose in the after math of a nine-years war.

Humans are now biologically engineered and socially conditioned to fall into caste systems, ranking from administrators (Alpha++) to brute labor (Epsilon--). Pavlov-like conditioning is implemented throughout a person's lifetime to keep them loyal to their caste, to their job, and to the ideals of the world state. When emotional distress occurs, it is dealt with through soma, a drug of some sort. The World State doesn't control everyone: there are "savage reservations" where people still live off the land, and WS people sometimes tour these areas for their own amusement.

The book's story shows that despite all of this conditioning, the human animal has still not created a society in line with its nature: several of the main characters are frustrated by it, and some by their inability to fit in as well as they would like. One of them -- Bernard Marx -- takes a female acquaintance of his to a Savage Reservation, where he meets a World State citizen named Linda who was lost on her outing here -- and who has in the meantime become a mother, an act which is obscene in the extreme for World-Staters. Her grown son John ("John the Savage, typically referred to as The Savage") has grown up trying to behave like a man of two worlds: he tries to please his mother, who has been conditioned to live in the world state, and he tries to live like those on the reservation. He can do neither well, so he asks Bernard if he might join him on a trip back to the World State.

From the Savage's reaction to what he finds in the world state -- not the utopia his mother described but a shallow, sterile, and shockingly indecent place where no one cares about anyone else -- where the joys and miseries of human existence are absent, replaced by self-indulgent human-sized infants. He eventually confronts a world controller (a top bureaucrat), and the two talk for a few pages as the controller explains why science, art, religion, and the family had to be destroyed -- and the Savage defends them.

I don't know a lot about the book's historical context. I'm more familiar with HG Wells' idealistic notions. It's certainly thought-provoking. One question it raises is the source of human happiness: does it come from avoiding unpleasant things and enjoying as many pleasurable sensations as possible? Or do we as sentient creatures really need things like wonder, art, and family to feel fulfilled? Again, I don't know the context Huxley was writing, and I'd like to know more about the social developments that led him to write this to see what their long-term implications might mean. I think it, like Ibsen's A Doll House, could be a "discussion" work, rather than one you just read for the story.