I shall begin at the beginning.

"'Embryos are like photograph film,' said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. 'They can only stand red light'" (Brave New World, 11).

For my summer reading, I'm going to start with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World . . . in your pants.

Yes, it is four in the morning.

The first chapter is impressively quotable, but I think I found one excerpt that successfully encapsulates the predominating idea of the chapter. Obviously, the well-informed Mr. Foster presented us with a simile when he compared the racks of human embryos to photograph film.

What Mr. Foster said here piled onto a goldmine of dehumanizing language in this chapter. The Director's generalization speech -- complete with "incubators," "optimum temperatures," and "ripened eggs" -- did an exceptional job of reminding me of the baby chicks we hatched in third grade. However, to me, the blatant comparison of the embryos to lifeless photograph film was the most effective rhetorical technique Huxley used to portray the, uh, process as systematic and tasteless.

Furthermore, behind the dehumanizing process was a backdrop of passiveness. As Mr. Foster made the film comparison, he said it "waggishly," as if it were a quaint joke. So in the year A.F. (after . . . ffff . . .) 632, multiplication and predestination of embryos is totally normal.

Which brings me to what I think the main idea of this exposition was -- to set the reader in an era in which radically unfamiliar treatment of embryos and children and who knows what else is culturally acceptable. Mayyybe? Also, I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to envy this speculative world, but I'm guessing that its flaws are going to manifest themselves later on.