A follow-up to one of our PNJA discussions

Not sure you remember, but there was one class a few weeks ago where we talked briefly about eugenics and genetic engineering and I decided to recommend two novels to you back then. It's taken me a while, but here I am, to talk about books. Again. ;)

Okay, the first one is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932. It was meant to be a satire, a "negative utopia", to use Huxley's own words. Anyway, it's set in a new world where people are divided into five different castes, from Alphas and Betas (who are unique), through Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons who are sort of 'mass-produced' to perform inferior tasks necessary for the society to function. Happiness and harmony are an obligatory state and to ensure it, people's consciousness and subconscious are constantly being manipulated. There are no families - mothers, fathers, children, save for the reserves where so-called "savages" live.

I read this book probably 20 years ago and while I can't remember all the details, the message has stayed with me all these years. It's an extremely thought-provoking read, as is the second novel I want to recommend here, a science-fiction one: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, published in 2005.

Ishiguro is also an author of a wonderful and successfully adapted novel "The Remains of the Day", but this one is entirely different, and certainly very unsettling. I don't want to give away too much of a plot, so I'll only say it takes place in a boarding school in England - but it's not a typical boarding school at all, for its students are unusual, in an unexpected way.

I highly recommend both of them; they're also available in Polish.