Books like Brave New World
What should you read after Aldous Huxley’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Aldous Huxley
- 1931
- Dystopian fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Brave New World
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall match1984
George Orwell
The other half of the dystopian argument: Huxley's state drugs you into compliance, Orwell's stamps on you. Read together they cover nearly every way a society gets owned.
- Freedom versus comfort
- Ideas over characters
- Pleasure as control
- Bleak and brutal, never seductive
Best for the satire of consumer cultureFahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Bradbury's citizens aren't oppressed so much as entertained into stupor by wall-sized screens. It is the distraction half of Huxley's warning, at half the length.
- Pleasure as control
- Satire of consumer culture
- Freedom versus comfort
- More lyrical than argumentative
Great matchThe Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Atwood builds her regime out of the same raw material Huxley did — control of reproduction — but hers is puritan rather than pharmaceutical, and told from inside one woman's body.
- Babies made to order
- Freedom versus comfort
- Ideas over characters
- Frightening rather than funny
Best for the ideasWe
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The book Huxley was accused of borrowing from: a glass city, numbered citizens, a mathematician who catches feelings. Stranger and more jagged than either famous dystopia.
- Engineered happiness
- Ideas over characters
- Freedom versus comfort
- Modernist prose, harder going
Worth a look — with a warningA Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Also about conditioning people into good behaviour, and just as unconvinced that it counts as goodness — except Burgess makes you sit inside the violence to get there.
- Freedom versus comfort
- Ideas over characters
- Pleasure as control
- Graphic sexual violence early on
Great matchNever Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
People raised for a purpose they never chose and never seriously resist. Ishiguro keeps the machinery offstage; the horror is how gently everyone accepts it.
- Babies made to order
- Freedom versus comfort
- Engineered happiness
- No satire, no set-piece arguments
Best for the engineered happinessThe Giver
Lois Lowry
A community that abolished pain, colour and choice in one stroke. Huxley's premise at a child's eye level, and you can finish it in an afternoon.
- Engineered happiness
- Freedom versus comfort
- Ideas over characters
- Written for younger readers
Great matchAnimal Farm
George Orwell
Orwell in fable form: a hundred pages on how a promise of equality hardens into a hierarchy nobody voted for. Blunter than Huxley and quotable to the last line.
- Ideas over characters
- Freedom versus comfort
- Satire of consumer culture
- Allegory, not worldbuilding
Worth a look — with a warningThe Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
Bread and circuses played straight: a Capitol that keeps its districts docile with spectacle. Good if you want Huxley's idea as a thriller rather than an argument.
- Pleasure as control
- Satire of consumer culture
- Freedom versus comfort
- YA action, little philosophy
Great matchNineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's novel under its full title, and worth naming twice: pairing it with Huxley is the oldest reading suggestion in the genre because the two really do complete each other.
- Freedom versus comfort
- Ideas over characters
- Same book as the 1984 entry above
Worth a look — with a warningThe Road
Cormac McCarthy
The far end of the spectrum: no state, no comfort, nothing engineered at all. Worth it if what held you was the question of what a person is for.
- Freedom versus comfort
- Ideas over characters
- Post-apocalyptic, not dystopian
Best for the satireThe Circle
Dave Eggers
Soma reissued as a friendly tech campus where everyone volunteers for their own surveillance. The satire is broad and obvious, and uncomfortably close to a normal Tuesday.
- Pleasure as control
- Satire of consumer culture
- Engineered happiness
- Blunt characters, thin prose
Great matchOryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Atwood on engineered people, corporate compounds and pleasure industries, narrated after it all collapsed. The closest anyone has come to Brave New World with modern biotech in view.
- Babies made to order
- Satire of consumer culture
- Engineered happiness
- Told from after the collapse
What should you read after Brave New World?
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is 1984 by George Orwell — the other half of the dystopian argument: Huxley's state drugs you into compliance, Orwell's stamps on you. Read together they cover nearly every way a society gets owned.
If what stayed with you was pleasure as control, read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury instead: bradbury's citizens aren't oppressed so much as entertained into stupor by wall-sized screens. It is the distraction half of Huxley's warning, at half the length. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is the other strong option — atwood builds her regime out of the same raw material Huxley did — control of reproduction — but hers is puritan rather than pharmaceutical, and told from inside one woman's body.
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