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Thanks for posting this.

Unlike in the book by Orwell (Huxley’s pupil at Eton), in which independence of mind earns you torture and brainwashing, Huxley’s freethinkers are threatened with expulsion to a small island (Iceland) — but the joke turns out to be that this isn’t really a punishment because all the cool artists and original thinkers wind up together and are much happier in their own hipster enclave. Iceland: the sixth borough.

I had to read it in school and don't remember that. But here it is:

The words galvanized Bernard into violent and unseemly activity. "Send me to an island?" He jumped up, ran across the room, and stood gesticulating in front of the Controller. "You can't send me. I haven't done anything. It was the others. I swear it was the others." He pointed accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. "Oh, please don't send me to Iceland. I promise I'll do what I ought to do. Give me another chance. Please give me another chance." The tears began to flow. "I tell you, it's their fault," he sobbed. "And not to Iceland.

Aldous Huxley must have had premonitions of the coming Icelandic financial crisis (and it's strange how he forgets that his own country is itself an island).

There is that contrast between Orwell's future and Huxley's. One controls through shortages and force, the other through superabundance and infantilization.

But thinking about it for a while you realize that the state or the guardians play a major role in Huxley's world. It's not libertarian by any means.

Mustapha Mond, the “Controller” who serves as the book’s villain, suppresses old books but perhaps unnecessarily. Think about how publishing works in the age of the Kindle and the Nook: Manufacturers and booksellers no longer have any incentive to try to get you to buy pre-copyright books published before 1922. If a fad suddenly developed for, say, Charles Dickens, there’d be no money to be made because readers could simply download his e-books, free, from Project Gutenberg or some other public-interest site. Dickens’ bicentennial just passed, by the way: remember the big marketing push to take advantage? Neither do I. Amazon won’t be reserving promotional space on its homepage for e-books that earn nothing and it’ll be long before the 26th century when all the classics fade into what the literary critic Clive James called “Cultural Amnesia.” Soon the only readers of these books will be forced ones (i.e. students) but in the age of Twitter how much longer will that last?

Barnes and Noble put out editions of out-of-copyright classics, but I got the impression that was more for show and a small part of their business.

Smith raises a really interesting possibility here that even that small presence of those classics will fade as e-books replace print.

Dickens centennial? People celebrate those things by watching the videos. Sorry, but that's just the way it is now.