Editor’s note: This is the text of the acceptance speech by Pulitzer-winning author Jack Miles, co-trustee of the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust, for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the 2026 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner. Miles delivered a somewhat shorter speech Aug. 16, 2026, during the 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
By Jack Miles
Speaking for the Aldous and Laura Huxley Literary Trust, I am pleased to salute the Libertarian Futurist Society for awarding the Society’s Prometheus Award to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian masterpiece, Brave New World.
By imagining proleptically and prophetically just how far state control over society might go, Brave New World delivered a warning that is as needed now as it ever was.
A TIMELY LESSON FOR TODAY
During the same week when I learned of this new honor for Huxley’s novel, I learned that the State of Iowa has required its removal from school libraries under a statute banning from the libraries any book with sexual content.
HarperCollins, as a publisher of many affected books, challenged the legality of the Iowa statute in court and won at the district court level but then lost on appeal. Currently, rather than file a further appeal addressing the statute as such, the publisher has filed a narrower appeal of the statute’s applicability to Brave New World.
Any serious reader might be reminded at this juncture of how monstrously determined the state in Brave New World is to deter children from reading through behavioral conditioning that begins in infancy.
In Chapter Two, a large bare sunlit room has been furnished with luscious, artistically arranged bouquets of flowers. Then the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning enters the room.
“Set out the books,” he said curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out – a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
“Now bring in the children.”
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden…with eight-month-old babies…all (since their caste was delta) dressed in khaki.
“Put them down on the floor.”
The infants were unloaded.
“Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.”
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages…The director waited until all were happily busy. Then, “Watch carefully,” he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse…pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
“And now,” the Director shouted…, now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.”
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic helps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
The director allows the torture to continue for only a few minutes, but a few are all that is needed. With the ear-splitting siren and the electrified floor turned off, the director needs only demonstrate how effective the operant conditioning has been. He gives the nurses his next order:
“Offer them the flowers and the books again.”
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
“Observe,” said the Director triumphantly, “observe.”
Note well: The state that in Brave New World is so determined to deter children from reading is not in the least concerned to deter them from erotic play. On the contrary, erotic play is not just allowed but encouraged. Erotic play conditions children to assume their later role as adults in a society that positively requires promiscuous sex and proscribes only couple formation as a latent threat to the state. As for reproduction, that is now a state function rather than a private one.
So, yes, Brave New World is in its way a book with sexual content, but what it aims to stimulate is not sexual arousal but thought about the place of sexual arousal in social and political life. It is not, of course, a book for third-graders, but it is certainly a book that might induce a high-school junior to compare his consumption of pornography with the novel’s presentation of “feelie” cinema as a state tool intended to induce political passivity through sensual addiction.
THE DECLINE OF READING AND THE RISE OF A.I.
What should concern us more, however, than whether high-school students in Iowa read Brave New World is whether adults today anywhere in America bother to read, at book length, anything at all rather than allowing artificial intelligence, the soma of our day, to do their reading for them.
Ashley Dawson, writing from New York for The Los Angeles Review of Books, reports that New York subway cars are now festooned with “ads by obscure companies such as Genspark.ai, proclaiming the time-saving benefits of artificial intelligence.”
“Go home early,” the perky ads declare, “we’ve got your spreadsheets.” … Some ads go further, depicting AI not just as an invisible workmate but also as a furry purple llama sidekick that snuggles up against you, helping you approach the coming week with confidence and tranquility. …
Things are so extreme that you cannot even walk down a street in New York without being told by an ad on a bus that you should start using AI as your therapist.
Not everyone is happy about our new furry friends. … But Big-Tech bosses like Elon Musk sure are stoked about AI’s liberatory potential. Despite referring to ChatGPT in 2023 as “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization,” Musk has changed his tune and now proclaims that “millions or robots will [soon] take care of everything for you,” making money and work irrelevant by 2035.
Musk is not alone: pretty much all the Big Tech billionaire bros have adopted this line. It’s a seductive one, apparent in these Genspark subway ads: after all, if Big Tech is really giving us a bunch of furry friends who excel at doing work, why not let them do our spreadsheets and go home early? Hell, why go to work at all? Why not spend all your time at home snuggling with your furry purple friend?
AMERICA, NOT YET A TOTALITARIAN STATE
These ads have not been placed by a totalitarian American state because the American state is not yet totalitarian, but are there signs of a looming fusion between the Silicon Valley AI broligarchy and the Trump Administration?
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has long floated the idea of having A.I. companies give the country equity, including in meetings in Washington last month. And President Trump has mused publicly about the possibility of having A.I. companies provide the United States with stakes in their business.
So, perhaps as Sam and Donald make common cause, future seductive and omnipresent New York bus-and-subway ads will be paid for by AI owned by the United States or, if you will, by the United States owned by AI.
READING BRAVE NEW WORLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
I was seventeen years old when I read Brave New World for the first time, and I hope that the Harper Collins lawsuit, by perhaps raising the novel’s profile in Iowa, may lead seventeen-year-olds there to read it whether or not they find it in their school libraries.
As for the adults attending this award ceremony, if you have never read Brave New World or have not looked into it in years, pick up a copy, read or re-read it now, and discover how very right the Libertarian Futurist Society was to honor this classic in this year with its Prometheus Award.
ABOUT JACK MILES
Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has written on religion, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, Commonweal, and many other publications. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
The Norton Anthology of World Religions, of which he was general editor, was published in 2014 in hardcover and in 2015 in a six-volume paperback edition. A MacArthur Fellow during the years 2003-2007, he is most recently the author of God in the Qur’an (2018) and Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story (2019).
Note: This is one of about nine posts, a few published and others upcoming over the next two weeks, about the 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony, each publishing the text of one of the speeches.
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