Brave New World opens not with a character but with a building: the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where humans are decanted from bottles like champagne. Bokanovsky's Process splits one fertilised egg into up to ninety-six identical twins — the principle of the factory floor finally applied to the womb. The words “mother” and “father” have become obscenities; viviparous birth is a horror story whispered to giggling students.

The Hatchery makes the body; conditioning makes the mind. Infants are shown books and roses, then given electric shocks and sirens until they recoil from both for life — Deltas must not read, and must not enjoy nature, which is free and therefore unprofitable. At night, sleep-teaching whispers moral slogans into their pillows: sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions of the same sentence, until the child's mind is these suggestions.

The World State has five castes — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon — and you do not climb between them. Your caste is decided before you are decanted, calibrated by oxygen levels in the bottle: more oxygen for Alphas, less for Epsilons, who are deliberately starved of it until their brains will never quite catch up. After decanting, hypnopaedia completes the work. The lower castes are conditioned to be grateful — and the upper castes are conditioned to think this gratitude is a kindness done to them.

Sex in the World State is severed from reproduction, which happens in bottles, and from exclusivity, which is indecent. Promiscuity has been transformed from sin into civic duty. To want only one person, or to want them for long, marks you as suspect. When John the Savage falls in love with Lenina the Shakespearean way — wanting to deserve her, to marry her — she responds with the only script her conditioning has given her, which is to undress. Huxley saw what Orwell did not: a regime can control you better through what it lets you have than through what it forbids.

Soma is the regime's master tool. Half a gram for a half-holiday, a gram for a weekend, two for an Orient trip. It is alcohol without the hangover, religion without God, anaesthetic without surgery. The drug is everywhere and socially enforced. When anyone shows signs of distress, the reflex of those around them is to medicate the feeling out of existence. Soma is the substitute for everything the World State has abolished. The dystopia runs on consent because the consent is chemical.

John was born — actually born, viviparously — on a Reservation in New Mexico to a woman stranded there from the World State. His education came from a single battered volume of Shakespeare. When Bernard brings him to London as an anthropological curiosity, John carries with him a moral universe the World State has spent six centuries dismantling: love that demands sacrifice, grief that cannot be medicated, the conviction that suffering is the price and proof of meaning. His confrontation with World Controller Mustapha Mond — who has read Shakespeare too — is the philosophical heart of the book.