Editor’s note: Trev and Tessa Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s grandchildren, spoke Aug. 16, 2026, at the 46th Prometheus Awards ceremony to accept the award for Huxley’s classic dystopian novel Brave New World, the 50th work to be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. This is Trev Huxley’s speech.
By Trev Huxley
I look around today and find myself in a world that’s a combination of my grandfather’s, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and his former student George Orwell’s 1984.
A number of years ago I sat down with a senior Facebook executive who during our discussion looked at me and said “Trev we know more about you than you know about yourself.”
It was a bit of a boast, but not one that was a very hollow boast. They at the time were acquiring every commercially known database that they could get their hands on and compiling with the data they collected to create a profile of everyone in their network.
We now live in a society where surveillance has gotten into such an extreme level that the Chinese government virtually knows everything about everyone that lives there and can track them everywhere in real time. That’s the 1984 downside of my reality.
