Why is the Brave New World a dystopia?

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and true relationships.

Huxley's novel is chiefly a critique of the socialist policies that states had begun to advocate in the early twentieth century. Huxley, by 1932, had observed the increasing tendency of Western government to intrude upon people's lives. This intrusion, he believed, limited the expression of freedom and beauty that is integral to the human character. Through Brave New World and his other writings, he suggested that beauty is a result of pain and that society's desire to eliminate pain limits society's ability to thrive culturally and emotionally. Many readers initially found this difficult to accept, living as they did in the aftermath of World War I, when a lack of societal control had caused a war that inflicted great pain and death on an entire continent.