Huxley’s latest biographer, Nicholas Murray, explains that when Orwell sent Huxley an early copy of 1984, Huxley wrote back to say “that he had enjoyed it but believed his book was better prophecy,” with its portrait of a gentler but more effective totalitarianism than Orwell’s “boot smashing down on the face.”

This is a judgment that would not have surprised its author. With the Cold War now long over, and with that era’s public preoccupation with space, military technology, and the physical sciences redirected toward the biological and behavioral sciences and their potential to reshape human beings and society, Huxley’s dark tale has seemed “relevant” again. Orwell’s book, published in 1949, seemed to many readers the more apt dystopia for understanding the challenge of totalitarianism, since it could be said to capture the essential character of the regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For much of the Cold War, George Orwell’s novel 1984 eclipsed Aldous Huxley’s earlier work Brave New World.

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