The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The year is A.F. 632, After Ford. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is giving some students a tour of the factory that produces and conditions human beings from conception through childhood for their predestined roles in the World State. Human beings no longer produce living offspring. Instead, surgically removed ovaries produce ova that are fertilized in artificial receptacles and incubated in specially designed bottles.
             The Hatchery destines each fetus for a particular caste in the World State. The five castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon undergo the Bokanovsky process. The process involves shocking an egg into dividing again and again until up to ninety-six identical embryos form. They develop into ninety-six identical human beings. The Alpha and Beta embryos never undergo this process. The Director explains that the Bokanovsky process facilitates social stability because the clones are predestined to perform identical tasks within the same factory. The process enables the World State to enact its central slogan, "Community, Identity, Stability," with greater ease.
             Moreover, the Podsnap process enables the Hatcheries to speed up the ripening process of the eggs within a single ovary. Therefore, scores of related individuals can be produced with the ova and sperm of the same man and woman within two years. The average production rate is 11,000 brothers and sisters in 150 batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age. Mr. Henry Foster tells the attentive students that the record for this Centre is over 16,000.
             The fertilized embryos travel on a conveyer belt in their bottles for 267 days, the gestation time period for a human fetus. On the last day, they are "decanted," the version of birth in the World State. The entire process is designed to mimic a human womb, including shaking ever...