I feel Aldous Huxley's Island is at least as good as Brave New World, and imo, even better. It basically takes all the aspects that made the world in Brave New World a dystopia and shows how they could work in a utopia... And how that utopia eventually falls. It's depressing, but amazing. If you loved BNW, you owe it to yourself to give Island a whirl.
Confession: I've never actually read BNW. I am a bad, bad person, and will definitely seek to rectify that soon, especially as it seems to fit the criterion of being "mind-blowing" perfectly. The synopsis for Island does sound really intriguing though, albeit maybe just a little bit depressing. Both excellent suggestions!
It's eh. The message at the end is basically "life's a bitch and then you die." On the plus side it'll take you like an afternoon to read it. I opted to do a book report on it my junior year because a) I'd already read it once b) I could re-read it and write the book report in the amount of time it took my family to drive from Greely CO back home (4.5 hours). It's also kind of a mandatory underpinning of modern hipster dystopian thought and people will throw it in your face, usually in cartoon form.
"that's why we get high"
still relevant. What do you think of the argument that BNW is a utopian future, not dystopian.
Not buying it. Everyone who is happy is painted in a deeply unsympathetic light, and everyone who struggles gets POV. Huxley makes it pretty clear who we're supposed to relate to as fellow human beings, and it isn't the guys who are enjoying themselves. I think the argument is sort of like saying Time Machine is Utopian because both the Morlocks and the Eloi are making a living at it.
On a side note, I often wonder how "Utopia" came to represent a nice place where everyone is happy and things work perfectly. In More's Utopia, Utopia is an island where slavery is a key aspect of life and private ownership of any kind is outlawed, a place where State is everything and person is nothing. If anything Utopia should signify what we call a dystopia, and dystopia should not exist. And I'm not picking on you, just throwing it out there, because its something we hear so much in pop culture.