Huxley Vs Orwell

Huxley Vs Orwell

Brave New World and 1984 were both written by men who had experienced war on the grand scale of the twentieth century. Disillusioned and alarmed by what they saw in society, each author produced a powerful satire and an alarming vision of future possibilities. Although the two books are very different, they address many of the same issues in their contrasting ways.
Huxley's novel sets out a world in which society is kept carefully balanced, with the means of reproduction just as closely controlled as the means of production. Human beings and the goods they make are tailored to one another: people are created in order to fulfil particular purposes, and are encouraged to consume so as to maintain the cycle.
The society presented in 1984 is less comfortably balanced. The population is kept content with a rather meagre lot because of the constant war, which, as is explicitly stated in the Book, is a convenient means of maintaining the status quo, and the Party keeps a very close watch on those members of society who are deemed capable of disrupting it.
Although set in Orwell's future, 1984 does not put great emphasis on technological advance—indeed, within the society of Oceania, there is effectively none any more, because the methods required for proper scientific enquiry are antithetical to the demands of the Party, and thus real science has been abolished. Orwell posits a certain level of technological advance—the two-way television screens and the ever-present surveillance equipment, the novel-writing machines,, but not much else. His purpose was not to imagine the details of such technologies, but to present the use to which they are put.
Huxley goes considerably further in imagining scientific advance. In his World State, humans are engendered and grown in artificial wombs. There are also such things as 'the feelies', an extrapolation of today's cinema (in Huxley's case, 'the talkies' were quite a novelty). However, the idea of automation seems to have passed...