As prescient today as when it was first published in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World predicts a dystopian future not unlike our current world, where society has become increasingly artificial, automated and socially stratified.

Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in the roles they have been assigned at conception. Messy emotions have been anesthetized, and love, monogamy and familial relationships are considered obscene. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer. Everyone except Bernard Max, a discontented psychologist in the Conditioning Centre who harbours a secret longing to break free from this brave new world.

After visiting one of the few remaining communities of the “unenlightened” who live outside the bounds of the World State’s control, Bernard is exposed to an entirely new way of being. When he brings a young man from the community back with him, Bernard incites a dramatic and deadly clash of cultures that will force him to consider whether freedom, dignity, individuality and love are worth suffering for.

Aldous Huxley’s bold, terrifying and ingenious novel deftly sheds light on the human costs wrought by mindless automation and conformity. Brave New World stands alongside George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as one of the great classics of dystopian fiction—one that continues to feel just as chilling, powerful and relevant for our current age, as in the twentieth century.