Monday, August 31, 2015

Brave New Spiderhead

Escape from Spiderhead reminded me a lot of the book, Brave New World. First off both stories take place in a futuristic world. Second, people in both worlds abuse drugs in order to make themselves and other people feel certain ways. In Escape from Spiderhead each prisoner in Spiderhead had a thing called a MobiPak. This MobiPak contained drugs to make a person feel anyway that Abnesi wanted them to in order to do his experiment. In Brave New World the people take a drug called soma to help them escape any dissatisfaction in their life. However, in both these cases, the people are being controlled by the government. Though the prisoners in Spiderhead consent to the drugs they take, the government still has the power to make them consent if they don't with Docilryde. The people of Brave new world have been conditioned to love the drug soma by their government, so they do not really have a choice of whether they like it or not. Lastly, in both worlds there is an abundance of sex.

3 comments:

  1. I totally agree. This story was strongly similar to the book Brave New World! It's an interesting subject to consider, the effect of drugs in futuristic societies, but here the drug seems to be a little more intense. This story further reminded me of the book The Giver, where also young adults are given drugs to prevent sexual thoughts, quite the opposite of Escape from Spiderhead.

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  2. I also agree. The whole time I was reading Escape from Spiderhead, I was thinking about Brave New World. The whole government running experimentation, drugs, and emotions is big in both stories. I was also thinking that the characters are kind of the same in the books. There is one group controlling everything--the government in Brave New World and Abnesti in Escape from Spiderhead--and everybody accepts what is going on and happening to them and then there is one person who doesn't and ends up killing himself--John in Brave New World and Jeff in Escape from Spiderhead.

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  3. I agree as well! The similarities between Escape from Spiderhead and Brave New World are clear and obvious. The characters in each story are similar in their ending goals. Not only do both of them die by suicide, but they die because they do not want to live in the current world. I find it interesting that both characters thought the only way of escaping their terrible world was to kill themselves. Overall, Brave New World is an excellent book to compare to this short story.

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