Brave New World

The opening lines of the first chapter of Brave New World introduce the building inside of which the rest of the chapter takes place, “[a] squat grey building of only thirty-four stories” called the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre,” engraved with the “World State’s motto, Community, Identity, Stability” (3). Inside the building, the chapter follows the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) as he gives a crop of new workers a tour of the facility. They begin in the “Fertilizing Room,” where human ova (which have been surgically removed from women and “inspected for abnormalities” [5]) are “immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa” (5), and then undergo “Bokanovsky’s Process” (6).

The D.H.C. explains that this means subjecting the eggs to stressors so that they “bud,” or create multiple identical eggs from each of the originals, saying, “The principle of mass production at last applied to biology” (7). This process of producing identical humans, the D.H.C. continues, is “one of the major instruments of social stability,” allowing for there to be “Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines” (7). At this point, the D.H.C. calls over Henry Foster, a high-level worker at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre who takes “an evident pleasure in quoting figures” (8), to assist him as tour guide.