Brave New World is often described as the antithesis to the dystopian novel best ingrained in the public consciousness—George Orwell’s 1984—not because of its rosy portrait of the future, but because of the very different path that society takes on its way to destruction. For those who don’t know: 1984 gave the world the term Big Brother (used to describe the totalitarian figurehead who purportedly rules the oppressive and intrusive leviathan of a government), and the word in itself gives a good summary of what the book discusses.

Yet in Brave New World, the people have not been crushed by any sort of oppressive regime, but have given it the reins, giving themselves away to worldly and synthetic pleasures. The people of Brave New World, instead of going to the movies to escape reality, attend the feelies, where they feel all the feelings that were lost to them once, and the lower classes are rationed a psychoactive drug called soma to keep them happy in their squalor.

Read on to find a world where social classes are formed by intelligence, where those destined to be less intelligent are injected with alcohol as embryos to stunt their growth.