brave new world

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a dramatically transformed future state, especially one brought about by technology, in which familiar social structures and values have been replaced by something unfamiliar and potentially troubling; the phrase is taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest and was adopted as the title of Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel; in contemporary usage it most often signals cautious ambivalence about rapid technological change, implying that the new world being created may be wondrous and deeply unsettling in equal measure