"Brave New World's" ironic title comes from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest.

"O wonder!  How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in it!"

“Brave New World.” The original work described society in the future where people had been stratified into haves and have-nots. The “Brave New World” denizens were plied with pleasure, distraction, advertisement and intoxicating drugs to lull them into complacency, a world of perfect consumerism, with lower classes doing all the work for an elite.

“Brave New World Revisited” was Huxley’s nonfiction response to the speed with which he saw modern society careening to that bleak future.

Huxley wrote in the book: “Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State—that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite.” Huxley goes on to write, “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.”

From the Brave New World of Occupy Wall Street by Amy Goodman.

It is startling to look at Huxley's predictions and compare our present world to his fiction.

Sadly, it no longer fiction, but reality.