Ape and Essence

Name: Ape and Essence
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Aldous Huxley
ISBN: 9798331904104

Author: Aldous Huxley

Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Unabridged: 4 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/07/2025

Categories: Fiction, Classic, Literary Fiction, World Literature

Synopsis

When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first appeared in 1932, it presented in terms of purest fantasy a society bent on self-destruction. Few of its outraged critics anticipated the onset of another world war with its Holocaust and atomic ruin. In 1948, seeing that the probable shape of his anti-utopia had been altered inevitably by the facts of history, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence. In this savage novel, using the form of a film scenario, he transports us to the year 2108. The setting is Los Angeles where a "rediscovery expedition" from New Zealand is trying to make sense of what is left. From chief botanist Alfred Poole we learn, to our dismay, about the twenty-second-century way of life.

About Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Perennial Philosophy, and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Matthias on October 25, 2016

"There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances." I was reading Ape and Essence in a sunlit par......more

Goodreads review by Jonfaith on January 10, 2019

Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes I've elected to storm into the ranks of Huxley, like a Korean antihero in a Vengeance film. This is a peculiar fruit. There was much from which I recoiled. I feel at moments that History had made the novel look foolish and impotent. The reasons to dis......more

Goodreads review by Chris on March 28, 2016

[All chanting]:Give me Detumescence. Give me Detumescence. Give me Detumescence.In a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by the nefarious nationalistic exploitation of science, Huxley offers up a supremely hilarious post-apocalyptic satire. In Los Angeles, a new religion has arisen where the Devil (as Be......more

Goodreads review by Sara on December 30, 2016

Prvih 50-ak stranica bila sam totalno izgubljena u knjizi, radnji i svemu ostalome, a onda... Mračno, ironično, potresno i genijalno, sve ono što Huxley je.......more

Goodreads review by Roxana on September 09, 2017

Two guys from Hollywood are talking about... stuff. One of them is the first-person narrator, the other is a guy who's gotten a mistress despite the fact that he didn't really want one, and now he's in trouble with his wife. I'm making it sound way more interesting than it actually is. I spaced out w......more