Genre Study - Science Fiction

Genre is a set of codes and conventions that guides both reading and writing, but transforming contexts and values bring about changes in such conventions as writers deviate in new ways and create formation subgenres that include new subversions and transformations of the codes. These deviations later solidify into conventions which science fiction writers use to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be human. Within the variety of forms, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World and Karel Capek’s early 20th century science fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots or R.U.R both project contemporary trends into a dystopian future to warn their world and to promote controversy and debate about the possible consequences of scientific endeavour, and by extension, what it actually means to be human. The creation of a new world allows the contemporary audience to view the imagined world as a metonymic representation of their own, as well as allowing the audience insights that challenge our assumptions about what it means to be human.

Brave New World extrapolates from contemporary contextual trends that Huxley found ideologically frightening into the dystopian future of the totalitarian “World of State” of “632 A.F” after Ford, to speculate about a future society that combines the follies and vices of both Capitalism and Communism. In the novel, verisimilitude transmogrifies into speculation about social order as, within the “London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre,” humans are engineered and “decanted” in a Henry Ford-like mass-production line of “Bokanovskification” that produces a genetically determined caste and class system of “Alphas, Beta, Gammas, Delta and Epsilons”. The “London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” that produces these genetically determined beings, epitomizes that the lack of paternity causes a lack of humanity that in turn adds to create a dystopic world for those beings to live in.
The citizens of the World State are