Brave New World starts in the year 2495 at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a place for research and a factory that produces and then socially-conditions test-tube babies. The date is 632 After Ford, this year being based on the year of birth of Henry Ford (1863), the well known car manufacturer and assembly line creator who is seen like the god in this fictional society.
Five castes or classes exist. They are the first five letters of the Greek alphabet: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Upper castes are the more intellectual castes and the lower castes are less intelligent members of society and they tend to perform manual labor. Everyone is conditioned by electric shock and hypnopaedia to reject or desire what the State wishes and decides. For example, infants are taught to hate flowers and books, but encouraged to seek out new products, sex and entertainment in general. Most importantly, they are conditioned to be happiest with their own caste (group) and to be glad they are not a member of any other group. For instance, while eighty Beta children sleep on their cots in the Conditioning Centre, there are speakers with a voice explaining why being a beta is better than being a member of any other caste.
The story starts in the Hatcherys employee locker room where Lenina Crowne, a Beta, talks about men with another female worker, Fanny Crowne. They talk about Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus who is thought of as abnormally short, thought to be from an overdose of alcohol added to the blood surrogate surrounding his embryo during development. Generally thought of as melancholic and antisocial, he is unusually withdrawn and depressed, despite regular doses of Soma, a drug that induces happiness and euphoria. Still, in spite Bernards oddness, Lenina finds him attractive and wants to date him. Lenina had been going out with the Centres research specialist, Henry Foster, for four months this being considered as an abnormally long time. Wanting a change from the places they always gothe feelies, which are films made to be able to touch and feelLenina and Bernard go on a holiday to the New Mexico Savage Reservation, a natural area inhabited by sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds living without television, books, and hot water, still giving birth to their own children, and still worshiping a mix of Christian and pagan gods. To stop the savages from escaping, the whole area is surrounded by an electric fence.
Upon exploring the Reservation, Lenina is in horror at the sight of mothers taking care of their own infants, elderly people who actually look their age because they have not been chemically treated, and a ritual of sacrifice in which a boy is whipped, his blood scattered on snakes. After seeing this ritual, Lenina and Bernard meet a man named John, who, contrary to them and all they know, was not born from a test tube. His mother, Linda, gave birth to him in the Reservation. On a previous visit from civilization to the Reservation many years previously, Linda, while pregnant with John, was left by Johns father, who then returned to civilization after Linda disappeared and was thought to have died. Bernard became aware that Johns father is none other than Bernards enemy, the Director of Hatching and Conditioning, the man who tried to exile Bernard to Iceland for being an individualist. Johns mother, Linda, has always disliked the Reservation, and John, although he wishes to become a part of savage society, is ostracized because he is white, the son of a civilized mother and because he reads books, most notably the works of Shakespeare.
Johns outcast status makes him more likable to Bernard. John, meanwhile, is falling madly in love with Lenina, and like Linda, he is looking forward and excited about going to civilization. At the request of Bernard, John and Linda leave with Bernard and Lenina to, as John says it (quoting from Shakespeares The Tempest), the Brave New World.
Back in London, Bernard is suddenly the center of attention: he uses Lindas pregnancy and abandonment, and her subsequent child, to disgrace the Director. He then introduces John (known then as the Savage, or Mr. Savage) to Alpha society. Linda then begins to slowly die from a Soma overdose. John starts to hate the drug that kills his mother, and he becomes more and more disenchanted with this Brave New World s open promiscuity, sexuality and disapproval of marriage. When John finally tells Lenina of his love for her, she is extremely happy and makes many sexual advances. Because he very much disapproves at the idea of sex before marriage, however, John proposes to her. She is very shocked. She says that is is an awful idea.
After this failed romance, John must yet face another severe crisis. He arrives at the Park Lane Hospital to see his mother die, and he is stunned when a class of small children come in for their conditioning in death acceptance and start pointing at her. Leninas rejection and then his mothers death finally push John over the limit. He begins ranting in the hospital hallways, and then he throws the staffs daily soma ration out of a window. The angry, soma-dependent staff attack John. Bernards friend, Helmholtz Watson, rushes to help John as Bernard shyly watches. The police arrive in time to control the disturbance, arrest the three men, and take them to the office of the Controller for Europe, Mustapha Mond. The Controller tells John he is obliged to stay in civilization as a continuous experiment. On the other hand, Bernard and Helmholtz are to be exiled to separate islands.
At the end of the novel, John, unable to withstand the judgement of the Controller, runs away to the countryside to live close to nature without artificial happiness, a life with a bit of beauty, reality, and pain. But eventually, John is viewed ritually whipping himself and becomes the center of media attention. In the aftermath of this event, John gives in to the temptation of the crowds spontaneous orgy of sex, Soma and violence. The next day, unable to live in the Brave New World, John hangs himself.
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