Huxley hits the proverbial nail on the head with this biting dystopian satire of the dangers of democracy. We see it in our daily lives of the dangers of an ill educated populace able to vote and elect dangerous individuals. However, the problem lies perhaps not in democracy but the criteria we use for people to qualify and allowed to vote. Plus a media completely controlled by an oligopoly of billionaires who have their own agenda. This story is interesting as it was written just at the beginni...

Not long ago, I wrote about how, though Aldous Huxley's non-fiction never really spoke to me, I always seemed to enjoy his fiction. Now I have to go back on my statement.Ape and Essence is half-baked nonsense. It is warmed over Brave New World without compelling ideas or characters that the reader cares about. The plot concerns a world that has been decimated by nuclear war and the totalitarian society that arises in its aftermath. Well--it's sort of about that. It begins in Hollywood, where a c...

Though I adored Brave New World, and therefore considered myself familiar with its famous author, I had never even heard of Ape and Essence before stumbling across it on one of the dustier shelves in the local library. Never again will I make the mistake of relegating an author to the "one-book-wonder" list. This little 150 page book is so utterly bizarre, eerie, beautiful and perfect that from the very first reading it has leapt straight into my list of all-time favourites. Brave New World make...

America the FearfulFear turns democracy into tyranny. Perhaps fear is the foundation of democracy, the fear of material or spiritual loss. Isn’t that the sentiment behind the dispersion 0f power in constitutional government? If so, the Trump-phenomenon may be an inevitable consequence of democratic politics. And the thing to be feared most.I am reading Ape and Essence, written in 1948, while the racist Trump rally is taking place in North Carolina. Chants of ‘Send her back’ are being directed at...

[All chanting]:Give me Detumescence.Give me Detumescence.Give me Detumescence.In a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by the nefarious nationalistic exploitation of science, Huxley offers up a supremely hilarious post-apocalyptic satire. In Los Angeles, a new religion has arisen where the Devil (as Belial) has substituted God, while maintaining all other aspects of today's structured institutions of faith. Using this simple device, he penetratingly skewers organized religion more effectively than

Re-reading my precious 1st edition page 51 "Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the bum or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously toward him. “Your

Give me detumescence We are all apes - That's the essence.I don't know if Huxley was on psychedelic drugs while writing this, but I surely felt like being on some while reading it.

Two guys from Hollywood are talking about... stuff. One of them is the first-person narrator, the other is a guy who's gotten a mistress despite the fact that he didn't really want one, and now he's in trouble with his wife.I'm making it sound way more interesting than it actually is. I spaced out while reading some of their discussion, which was about Gandhi getting murdered and the nature of marxism and fascism and politics and whatever.In the middle of the philosophy, I shut the book and read...

A literate neighbor (they do exist, I have one!) left a library-bound edition of this incredible novella on the console table in my building's hallway, and I wish I could thank the fuck out of them. Holy shit. On a scale from The Handmaid's Tale to Rosemary's Baby, this book lands somewhere in the middle, and deserves a place on your shelf next to your dogeared copy of Brave New World. Two screenwriters discuss their mistresses and their miseries in Hollywood before stumbling across a rejected s...

"There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances." I was reading Ape and Essence in a sunlit park when I was struck by this line. It emitted a beacon of light that folded back on itself and enveloped these words, this book, my hands, my legs, the ground under my feet, the park, the city, its sur

After reading Brave New World while still in the public schools, either in junior or senior high, I went into a Huxley phase, purchasing and reading his Brave New World Revisited, Island, The Devils, Heaven and Hell, The Doors of Perception and this one, Ape and Essence. Pulling it out of the bookshelf in my room more than once during high school, I repeatedly replaced it unread, the theatrical elements of it putting me off. Recently, however, several other Huxley nonfiction works having been re...

This is th most original, misantropic, terrorific,grotesque postapocaliptic distopia perhaps ever written.In this book Huxley makes the most corrosive acid satire,with touchs of the blakest humor on the human nature and human civilization i ever read,all is demolished,the ideologies,marxism,capitalism,nationalism,militarism,christianism,the bad use of science and technologie.Is the final victory with our help of the evil over the good in a inverted moral values world,a world where actually Belia...

Two motion picture executives stumble across a screenplay in the lot. The majority of the book is the text of that document. It is about a future era, post World War III, when the residents of Southern California worship the devil and sex is outlawed except for two weeks once per year. The resulting infants are increasingly more deformed due to radiation fallout. The action of the 'film' seems to be mostly an excuse to espouse the philosophy that human kind, following the Second World War were i...

While I was reading this book I laughed and realized this is where DEVO got all their shit from. Huxley, back in the 1930's said (in this brilliant novel) that while we technologically advance we will behave more and more like crazed apes..."The Truth Behind De-Evolution". I'm sure the Mothersbaugh and Casale Brothers read this book more than a few times when they attended Kent State in Ohio. Huxley switches time span gears like crazy, veering from a Darwinian 1930's Busby Berkeley musical to a

"The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, the prurient ape's defiling touch. And do you like the human race? No, not much."I read this book in high school after I had finished Brave New World. Almost back to back. "Ape and Essence" is a story-within-a-story, a screenplay written by one of the semi-autobiographical characters. The screenplay is rescued from the Hollywood reject bin, and after the finders find the author on his desert hacienda, the screenplay then becomes the novel. The quote, above...

Awesome book. Heres some quotes....actually, fuck it, im too lazy to add them. Read the book you lazy ass....its short, so dont worry...Also, usually I agree with the reviews on "goodreads.com" but most of Huxley works are given three stars here??? Duh-fuck is wrong with you all! Dude's a fuckin genius! OK, that's enough elitism for today...

Take Brave New World (1931) and scroll the calendar to 1948, after World War Two and Hiroshima. Significantly, the action begins on the day that Gandhi was assassinated. The world that author Aldous Huxley gives us in Ape and Essence is slightly different.There has been a World War Three that decimated the entire population of the world, except for New Zealand, which sends an expedition to Southern California. One of the scientists, a botanist named Alfred Poole, is kidnapped by the surviving hu...

I'm honestly not sure what to feel about this book. The first thing to note is that it's not nearly as accessible as Brave New World. It's much less straight forward, more surreal, and sometimes I felt that a thesaurus vomited on a few pages of it. It's not an easy book to follow, and there were some parts I really didn't understand until I started reading about it online. However, once you get into the swing, and you figure out who's doing what (I had to go back and reread a few times to sort s...

Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomesI've elected to storm into the ranks of Huxley, like a Korean antihero in a Vengeance film. This is a peculiar fruit. There was much from which I recoiled. I feel at moments that History had made the novel look foolish and impotent. The reasons to dislike this were LegionThe novel's thrust is a rejected screenplayThe narrative then is couchedin satirical and cinematic termsspeaking of a futurea world devastated by nuclear exchangeKiwis having no s...

Well if Hux were around to day perhaps he'd be amazed how close we're coming to this (less well-known than BNW) negative Utopia. In a world where crotchless thongs are marketed to 9-year- olds, college coaches (as well as priests) sodomize boys-not-yet-men, women advertise themselves via the internet promising no more than a cooling effluvia of ejaculata, and countless millions of might-have-been love stories are food for salt, blood, and tears; it might not be such a far stretch to conclude hi