Yeah, I have to re-read Brave New World because over the time since I have read it I have come to believe it was actually Utopian. The artists and others that could not conform were in fact given an island where like-minded artists could flourish.
Sometimes I think that's all we all want: to find a community of like-minded people we can live among.
The islands in BNW: "[Bernard is] being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."
Brave New World features islands which are limited domains in which free-thinking is both permitted and encouraged, as Mustapha Mond explains to Bernard and Helmholtz late in the novel. In part these serve as centres of creativity which the World State needs.
Island is a paradise world which largely stands, as you note, as a counterpart to BNW. Though all does not go well.
