As I was reading Escape form Spiderhead I kept feeling as though I had read something like this before, when telling my friend Sam about how much I had liked the stories in this book she said "oh, I heard that was a lot like Brave New World". Then it clicked. As I went back and thought about it I realized all of the similarities: it was set in a futuristic world, there was a major theme revolving around drugs and the abuse of them, and the governments control over humans with these drugs and experimenting on their lives.
With these drugs the government could have the power make you feel and experience things that humans shouldn't have much control over. Your emotions, your feelings, your strength etc... all of these would be powerless and worthless to you because you may never know if these were your actual feelings or not. In Escape from Spiderhead and Brave New World alike both the protaganists ended up dying because society rejected them and their "old world" thinking.
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ReplyDeleteI agree that with drug testing, I would never know what my true feelings and emotions are. It is definitely scary to think of someone controlling the chemicals in my body, but I think it is scarier because those chemicals and hormones would still have a lot of power and worth to me. Jeff truly feels in love when under the drugs administered by Abnesti, so his feelings are still important to him even when he cannot control them. If the government constantly drugged people, like in Brave New World, they would not know that their emotions were not true until they were no longer influenced by the drugs. As readers, we can say that Jeff's emotions were worthless because he would not feel them independent of the drugs, but as a character, Jeff believed his emotions were real during testing.
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