![]() ![]() ![]() But tyranny ends in revolution and a restoration of the conservative philosophy: a perpetual waltz, the circle turning forever. But this latter creed, expecting the best from man, is usually disappointed, and disappointment is expressed in a greater governmental rigour, ending with downright tyranny (many tyrannical regimes have called themselves socialist). Pessimistic conservatism, expecting the worst from man, does not always get the worst and hence is modified in the direction of optimistic socialism. If the theological motto of A Clockwork Orange is ‘We must be free to make moral choices,’ that of The Wanting Seed is ‘Everyone has a right to be born.’ The history of a society is cyclical, as my hero Tristram Foxe teaches his overcrowded classes in a school of the future. But, my instinct argued, nature might respond to human sterility with sterile patterns of its own, and the solution to the population problem could be more ruthless and more logical. The response to the prospect of overcrowding and starvation might well be a culture which favoured sterility by promoting and rewarding self-castration. The Wanting Seed tries to show what England might be like if it suffered from the population of India. If the violence of the young, coupled with the reaffirmation of the necessity of evil in a world still animated by the right of moral choice, was the theme of A Clockwork Orange, its matching novel was concerned with a phenomenon I had been aware of while living in the East - the population explosion and the shrinking of the world’s food supply. Returning to Britain in 1959, I felt very much a stranger in a land that now seemed affluent, telly-haunted, and burgeoning with a cult of youth. In 1954 I had left a Britain suffering from shortages to live a hard-worked but moderately well-rewarded life in the Federation of Malaya. A Clockwork Orange was squeezed out of my appalled observation of youthful behaviour in an England which had become new and strange to me. The Wanting Seed appeared in the autumn of 1962, with A Clockwork Orange, my other piece of futfic or future-fiction, pairing it in the spring of that year. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. ![]()
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