Babies are decanted from bottles on an assembly line, sorted into castes, and conditioned to love their servitude so that rebellion becomes unthinkable. Aldous Huxley published this novel in 1932, and where Orwell would later imagine tyranny through pain, Huxley imagined it through pleasure: a world anaesthetised by soma, by engineered contentment, by the elimination of everything difficult or profound. The Savage serves as imperfect witness to what has been lost, but the true horror is how reasonable the dystopia seems, how little its citizens suffer and how much they have surrendered unknowingly. Huxley understood that the deepest unfreedom feels like happiness. His nightmare now reads less like prophecy than reportage.