It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young. At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, it’s a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography.
More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality. A tabloid scare a few years ago caused much hand-wringing about ‘Internet Child Adoption’; all that had happened was that a childless couple had used the internet to find the telephone number of an adoption agency overseas, but the addition of the word ‘Internet’ made the event instantly more shocking, as though someone had started a kind of eBay for orphans.
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