The Wanting Seed

The Wanting Seed could be described as a Malthusian comedy, for its underlying theme is the problem the whole world may soon have to face - over-population - and its technique is science fantasy and caricature. The setting is England (one of the chief members of Enspun or the English-Speaking Union) and the time is less the future than a sort of extension and distortion of the past.

The story is concerned with the vicissitudes of Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna, in their skyscraper world of spacelessness, where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. All is eventually transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

Blurb:

"Since its publication in 1962 much of Anthony Burgess's nightmare fantasy has become fact. His push-button Britain of blurred boundaries and high-rise plate-glass is very much with us.

The rest of The Wanting Seed is impossible . . . or is it? Food and living space are scarce, so procreation is discouraged and pederasty promoted. First by slogan - 'It's Sapiens to be Homo' - then by the Ministry of Infertility's sinister army of giggling 'greboys' [sic].

Revolt reverses this unnatural order. Anarchy, copulation and cannibalism grip the land - and the phoniest yet most vile of all wars is staged as a final solution."