In the future, pregnancy is outlawed, and citizens are required to engage in loveless sex and narcotics are used to ensure happiness in the population. Babies are created in the lab, and every child's future is predestined into one of five classes.
While most people are happy to retain this established order, including Thomas Grambell, a supervisor of human "hatcheries," resistance is growing, as evidenced by quirky malcontent Bernard Marx and other rebels.
Bernard and his girlfriend Lenina Disney go to a primitive reservation which holds to 20th century values, and while there meet a native named John (also called the Savage). They return with him to civilization, and his presence further upends conventional thinking. John is seen as a freak and this grants him some degree of celebrity. John develops romantic feelings for Lenina, which are considered highly inappropriate, bordering on the obscene.
John's parents are from the more technologically advanced part of the world, and he has educated himself using often banned works such as Shakespeare. John realizes that his sexual mores, based on the works he studied, are antiquated in this advanced society. He therefore asks to be assigned a solitary posting, but even as he mans the lighthouse alone, he cannot escape his memories of Lenina.
