True, the comparison is routinely deployed in headlines about every subject imaginable, an all-purpose vehicle for ominous overtones. Still, it seems apt in relation to climate change.

The vapid citizens who parade through Brave New World's pages are the embodiment of apathy, numbly incapable of enacting change. In the novel, the blame lies mainly with a designer drug called 'soma' - an allusion to a mythical Asian drink and a reminder that Huxley dabbled in mescaline and mysticism.

Across the genetically engineered, rigorously stratified World State, nothing is left to chance. In a portent of designer- and test-tube babies, newcomers to the realm are born in laboratories then raised with control freak zeal. No one goes hungry. 'Community, Identity, Stability', the masses chant. 'Everybody's happy nowadays,' says Lenina - the love interest - in a line powerfully echoed in a song by the British punk band the Buzzcocks.

But Lenina's troubled significant other, Bernard Marx, disagrees. He feels thwarted. His intuition tells him that their dialogue could amount to much more, if they could escape the constraints of the techno-futurist dystopia that keep them in check. He rebels but is crushed.

Apathy triumphs in Huxley's boldly eerie but marred meditation. If only the characters were more convincingly drawn. Many are one-dimensional. That criticism applies to the main couple and John, the noble savage, blasts utopia with a trite tirade against comfort. 'I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin,' John says. Thanks to such outbursts, Huxley's 'novel of ideas' can seem painfully earnest. Many readers might welcome the world that John preaches against, whatever the cost, just to avoid such prose.

Despite all the flaws that only a true soma devotee could fail to see, the novel seems unlikely to slip out of print soon, if ever. Packed with atmosphere, it remains the definitive take on denial and that overly sunny, vacuous version of paradise that we may inhabit: the fool's.