Brave New World, Intertextuality and Mieczysław Smolarski

Abstract

In 1948, Polish science-fiction writer Mieczysław Smolarski wrote an open letter to Aldous Huxley in which he accused Huxley of plagiarising, in his famous novel Brave New World (1932), two novels which Smolarski himself had written in the 1920s: Miasto światłości (A City of Light) and Podróż poślubna pana Hamiltona (Mr. Hamilton’s Honeymoon). The key argument presented in this paper is that even if Huxley had read these two novels (which is very unlikely), Brave New World would not have been altered in any considerable way, and that in 1931, the year in which he wrote Brave New World, Huxley was already a distinguished novelist and a profound thinker capable of writing a masterpiece without resorting to plagiarism.