Book cover for Ape and Essence

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When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first appeared in 1932, it presented in terms of purest fantasy a society bent on self-destruction. Few of its outraged critics anticipated the onset of another world war with its Holocaust and atomic ruin. In 1948, seeing that the probable shape of his anti-utopia had been altered inevitably by the facts of history, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence. In this savage novel, using the form of a film scenario, he transports us to the year 2108. The setting is Los Angeles where a "rediscovery expedition" from New Zealand is trying to make sense of what is left. From chief botanist Alfred Poole we learn, to our dismay, about the twenty-second-century way of life. "It was inevitable that Mr. Huxley should have written this book: one could almost have seen it since Hiroshima is the necessary sequel to Brave New World."-Alfred Kazin. "The book has a certain awesome impressiveness; its sheer intractable bitterness cannot but affect the reader."-Time.
  • ISBN10 0586061983
  • ISBN13 9780586061985
  • Publish Date 3 January 1985 (first published August 1967)
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 11 January 1994
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
  • Imprint Triad Books
  • Edition New edition
  • Format Paperback
  • Pages 144
  • Language English