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.
OUR DESIGNER DRUG: SOCIAL MEDIA
Aldous didn’t believe that oppression would be the successful method of controlling a population and in many ways he was correct. Yes, the plenitude of designer drugs that stupefies a portion of our population is obvious, just look around you on the streets, but the real, the super insidious drug in my mind is Social Media.
It has caused the dumbing down of a huge portion of the population particularly in “technologically advanced” societies. The invention of doom scrolling combined with very sophisticated algorithms that feed people only what tickles their pleasure sensors has just corrupted the entire fact-based world. Social Media combined with the introduction of artificial intelligence, and we’re on the precipice of something that even Aldous may not have imagined in 1932.
Brave New World is almost 95 years old and with that in mind, the foresight and intellectual power of Aldous’s brain is astonishing.
VISITING THE MUSEUM WITH MY GRANDFATHER
Many years ago, when I was around eight or nine, my mother, Ellen Hovde, and I and Aldous went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What many people don’t know is that Aldous went blind at age 16 due to an untreated eye disease. He actually learned Braille, about which he commented to me “the great thing about Braille is that one can read under the bed clothes without a flashlight.”
He would gain some of his sight back, but sight was a precious commodity to him that required great effort and concentration. (If you’re interested, read The Art of Seeing).
So, there we were at the museum, Aldous holding, what seemed to me, a gigantic magnifying glass peering at paintings about two inches away from the surface, scanning back-and-forth and back-and-forth and finally moving onto yet another painting scanning back-and-forth and back-and-forth.
You can only imagine how a young boy felt. This went on for approximately two hours and I wanted to scream with boredom and restlessness.
A MAGICAL PLACE – AND AN AMAZING INTELLECT
To my great relief we finally left the museum and started walking down Fifth Avenue to the Plaza Hotel where Aldous often stayed. To my sister and myself, the Plaza was a magical place, one that we associate with our grandfather. There was nothing like high tea and pastry that brought joy to his every visit with us.
With those thoughts in mind, I started to listen to what Aldous was saying. What he said was mind blowing. One has to remember that basically what he was able to see through his magnifying glass was probably a square inch, or maybe two square inches, of a given painting at a time.
And yet here he was, walking along describing to my mother, the entire painting itself, and then of course, adding its art history.
it was at that moment I realized I was in the presence of an intellect that was almost beyond imagination to me.
How did he do that?, I said to myself.
It still amazes me to this day.
My sister and I are very pleased to see Brave New World receive the Prometheus Award, an honor it justly deserves.
But I would also like to honor the man himself, a man of towering intellect and a wonderful grandfather.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
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