Brave New World

Brave New World is a novel by Adolphus Huxley that represents a satirical view of a dystopia.

Unlike the world of 1984, also a dystopia, this canon is fairly hedonistic and the characters are generally happy, if shallow, excepting several of the protagonists. This is essentially because they are engineered to be that way: "civilized" people are grown in bottles and treated in order to produce the desired level of intelligence, from Epsilon-caste dumb-as-bricks laborers to Alpha-caste decision-making types. Women don't give birth anymore, despite being encouraged by the state to have many sexual partners as a form of recreation; only the upper castes are fertile at all, and they use a form of birth control.

After being decanted, children are programmed to love their caste. The idea is basically that if you only know as much as you need to do your job, you won't make yourself unhappy by constantly striving for something better. Of course, this doesn't always work perfectly, as the events of the novel show.

Some people still live outside of civilization in "Savage Reservations," and still engage in barbaric things like having committed relationships and giving birth.

The drug soma from this continuum, used for producing a stress-relieving hallucinogenic "holiday" in case people are confronted by things they aren't programmed to understand, is a forbidden substance in the PPC.