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Almost a century on from its 1932 publication, Brave New World remains one of the stranger, sharper dystopias in the Western canon - a novel that has aged into something closer to satire than prophecy, and is arguably the more unsettling for it. Where Orwell imagined boots and fists, Huxley imagined bottles and soma, and history has been quietly proving him right ever since.

The premise is famously cold. In the World State of the far future, human beings are no longer born but decanted - manufactured in hatcheries, sorted in utero into a rigid caste hierarchy of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, and conditioned from infancy to love their allotted station. Disease and old age have been eliminated. Monogamy and motherhood are considered obscene. Leisure is filled with promiscuous sex, "feelies", Obstacle Golf, and gram doses of a pleasant, consequence-free drug called soma. Into this placid engineered paradise wanders John, the "Savage", raised on a reservation with only the collected works of Shakespeare for an emotional education, and the novel's central tension snaps into focus: is a world without suffering still a human one?

Huxley's great achievement is the world itself. The opening pages of the Hatchery, with their ghostly light and rubber-gloved technicians, are as vivid a piece of scene-setting as English science fiction has produced, and the vocabulary he invented - soma, decanting, hypnopaedia, the feelies - has lodged itself so firmly in the cultural memory that the title is now shorthand for any engineered future. The tone is drily comic, precise to the point of clinical, and laced with allusion. When Mustapha Mond and the Savage finally square off in the book's long closing debate, the result is genuinely bracing: a case for and against happiness conducted at the level of political philosophy, with neither side allowed to win cleanly.

The weaknesses are harder to ignore on a re-read. The plot is thin scaffolding for the ideas, and once John is retrieved from the reservation the novel loses some of its grip, settling into set-piece lectures and a final act that swerves into melodrama. The characters, apart from Bernard, Helmholtz, Mond, and John himself, are deliberately hollow, which is the point, but makes for curiously airless reading in places. Lenina in particular is ill-served; the book's treatment of its women has a nervous edge that looks, from 2026, a great deal like unexamined misogyny. And Huxley's own hand is visible throughout: an upper-class intellectual horrified that the masses might simply be content with stability, sex, and light entertainment, unable to quite conceal his belief that meaning requires suffering.

None of this sinks the book. If anything, the contradictions are part of what keeps it alive - a text that argues with itself, and with the reader, more productively than most of its successors. It is not as tightly plotted as Nineteen Eighty-Four, nor as emotionally affecting, but it has turned out to be the more accurate mirror. Essential, flawed, and quietly terrifying in the way only comedy can be.