Walden Two: First Thoughts

                I’m reading Walden Two. I wasn’t planning to compare Walden Two to Brave New World, but that was before I came across this snippet:

                “… Once in a while we manipulate a preference, if some job seems to be avoided without cause.”
              “I suppose you put phonographs in your dormitories which repeat ‘I like to work in sewers. Sewers are lots of fun,’” said Castle.
                “No, Walden Two isn’t that kind of brave new world,” said Frazier.






                So yeah. Skinner obviously intended that to be a sign.
                When I read Brave New World, I praised Huxley for being so creative in his introduction of a foreign society. He showed us a new world by giving us a tour of it. Skinner does the same with Walden Two.
                 Frazier, the creator of the utopia, is showing the narrator and his companions around the community, and has been for about 50 pages. I would not doubt that Skinner was inspired by Huxley’s tactics; literature is a cyclic creature. Inspired things become inspirations, ideas are recycled over millenniums and centuries and decades.
               Ah, literature. Muses inspired by muses.