It's the germ of pop-up Mad Ads spiralling through our brains, having issue in a new paucity - a desert of endless wanting - in an environment of plenty, which morphs in turn, overnight, into scarcity. As crop failures spread worldwide, reports of violent assaults, murders, and cannibalism begin to surface from around the world. Uh oh. As Tristram tries to get out of prison, Beatrice-Joanna gives birth to twins. Before she can find a good place to raise them, she's captured by the Population Police. Burgess' vocabulary is astonishing, and his writing style is engrossing - I learned many words which I have never heard or seen before, words which I struggled to even find definitions for in standard dictionaries. However, this did get a bit difficult at times, and his constant referral to the 'cycle of society', from Pelphase to interphase to Gusphase, was slightly confusing. Despite this, the writing was wondrous and a pleasure to read. NEVER undergoes a monstrous "Sea Change" into such a monstrous, "Rich and Strange" transmogrification as in this book.

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He served in the British army from 1940 to 1946 and was a schoolteacher in England before becoming a colonial education officer in 1954. His Malayan trilogy of novels and a history of English literature were published while he was living in Malaya and Brunei. Okay - what, exactly, is that nausea? An acute perception of the Void within us, and in those around us. It is the Clear Light in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. AKA, God’s conviction. The book closes with a translation of the final stanza of the French poet Paul Valéry's poem ' Le Cimetière marin'. The quotation clarifies the book's themes:Derek Foxe – Tristram's ambitious and opportunistic brother, becomes head of the Ministry of Infertility

In Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed, the story starts off, in what is known to the main character, Tristram, as the Pelphase. Tristram is a history teacher and knows mostly all there is to know about history. According to Tristram, governments go through three phases: the Pelphase, the Interphase, and the Gusphase. Tristram believes that like almost everything else, government is cyclical. The Pelphase is a time in the government and society where the people are working to better themselves, their surroundings and their country. The Wanting Seed is a great read. Part societal study and certainly a criticism of British society. Anthony Burgess ask what happens to British society if the population overwhelms food supplies. This has been called a comedy, but I am not sure I agree. It is certainly satire, but not so sure it is funny. He certainly lampoons the upper crust and social climbers along with British stoicism, yet it is wrapped in tragedy. The Wanting Seed is not the only dystopia dealing with reproductive freedom and overpopulation in the 1960s. In Burgess’s world, the failure of birth control leads governments to control the populace by eliminating citizens through orchestrated wars whose sole purpose is to kill people. Logan’s Run, the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, depicts the future world of 2116, where citizens are executed with a pleasure-inducing toxic gas as soon as they have reached the age of 21. Overpopulation is also the subject of Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, a 1966 novel, later adapted as the film Soylent Green (1973), starring Charlton Heston. As with The Wanting Seed, the film’s solution to famine caused by overpopulation is to convert people into food, the ‘soylent green’ of the title. Burgess claims in his autobiography that ‘Harry Harrison, on his own confession during the downing of a bottle of Scotch in my New York flat, stole the ending for the film of his novel No Room! No Room! [sic] called Soylent Green.’ Burgess may have misremembered this. As the writer Ramsey Campbell has noted, the novel has a different ending, and Harry Harrison was excluded from the production of Soylent Green by the film-makers. It is clear that many themes and ideas are shared between The Wanting Seed and the film version of Soylent Green, although Harrison himself seems not to have been responsible for the plagiarism. Often repeated in the novel is the concept that history is cyclical. As Tristram explains in the first few chapters to his slumbering history class, there are three phases: Pelphase, Interphase, and Gusphase.Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. Many put that inevitable fact off indefinitely, sloughing it off as the “correct” perception of absolute atheism. Yet it will convict us endlessly and relentlessly unless we’ve let ourselves be led from hand to hand by hand. What I didn't expect was the idea of this 'dystopia' being a rather attractive society to live in - one where homosexuality is not only legal but promoted and religion is absent. The entire narrative is laced with repugnant prejudices, which was to be expected from a novel written in the 1960s - however it was laughable to me that something which seemed to be viewed as a terrifying future in this book is rightfully accepted today. I eventually learned to just grit my teeth and bear it, although it originally made it hard to sympathise with any of the characters. Beware those who are easily offended, there is some especially incendiary stuff in here.