Blood Brothers Chapter Summary

The book begins in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the World State’s motto, “Community, Identity, Stability” is emblazoned upon the wall. The Director (D.H.C.) is showing some students the Centre, beginning with the Fertilizing Room. The story takes place in the year A.F.632 and we learn that it is very stable. He gives them a brief description of the fertilization process, explaining that children are no longer created by adults, but are now made in Centers such as this one. Preserved ovaries create “ova” which are fertilized and then put into incubators.

Now, we learn that there are five different types of social classes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons go through something called Bokanovsky 's Process. “Bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of

Using this process, “you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.” A man named Mr. Foster tells the students that the record for the amount of eggs produced by a single ovary in the Centre is sixteen thousand and twelve. However, in Mombasa the record is somewhere around the seventeen thousand mark.

Now, both the Director and Mr. Foster explain how the Centre works to the students. After being fertilized, the eggs go through a series of treatments on a conveyor belt while they are maturing. Each one, depending on its social class, receives a different treatment while on this long conveyor belt journey. On the last day, when the embryos are ready, “all the embryos were simultaneously shaken into familiarity with movement”, just as if they had exited a woman’ womb. The Director tells the students that, “all conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social