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I wholeheartedly agree that Brave New World is an important book -- I just can't stand it. The satire is thin, the extrapolations from the trends which Huxley observed in his time are too plain, and none of the characters are even remotely likable. The combination of childlike persons and the heavy emphasis of their sexual activities turned my stomach.

The Soviet Union with its planned economy and society was clearly one of the big inspirations for Huxley, and if so, he completely misunderstood it. Of course, in hindsight it's much easier to see that communism is just another form or brutal dictatorship that never was meant to do anything else but maximize the power in the hands of a few and to enslave everyone else, yet I think that Huxley should have seen this also. I think that George Orwell was a much keener observer of this fact. Indeed my biggest problem with the novel is that I disagree with Huxley's vision of totalitarianism. I cannot imagine a dictatorship that 1) is not based on an aristocracy that (either openly or covertly) enslaves and brutalizes those beneath them and 2) does not deal swiftly and brutally with its dissenters. Huxley's world is run by World Controllers, who plan and command everything, yet who genuinely seem to be concerned about making people happy (even if this means they have to make sure that a large number of people are born as cretins, and if they have to drug everyone in society) even at the cost of sacrificing their own happiness. If some of the intelligent ones actually start questioning the system, this regime just ships them off to a remote island of their choice, to be with similar-minded people. At one point the all-powerful Mustapha Mond openly envies those who get to go to the island. This is where the book finally and completely lost me. It has been said that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", and this is why I find Orwell's and Bradbury's dystopias far more believable than Huxley's.Get more detail about Brave New World.