The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)

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Life changes as the largely homosexual police ('greyboys') become more repressive, and a mysterious blight spreads across the world threatening food supplies. Tristram is arrested after getting unintentionally mixed up in a protest and spends the next section of the novel in jail. Given the right environment and a willingness to abandon traditional notions of freedom, Skinner claims, utopia might become a reality for everyone. Interphase is the darkening of Pelphase into Gusphase – an "Intermediate" phase. As Tristram explains things, the government grows increasingly disappointed in its population's inability to be truly good, and thus police forces are strengthened and the state becomes Totalitarian. In many respects, Interphase is a finite version of George Orwell's 1984. 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.

The Wanting Seed’ by Anthony Burgess is a disguised religious novel by an intellectual who may or may not still have been a Bible believer, but he most certainly retained gender prejudices and a blinkered social paradigm only someone raised in the Catholic Church would have. I think Burgess’s mind was trapped inside a Christian Catholic-themed box with a set number of rigid philosophies. Reading his novels is like living in a world with only two choices possible for every question of self, civilization, politics and social governance. An either-or paradigm of Humanity. Plus, he seemingly enjoyed poking political activists of all sorts into a rage. The Wanting Seed begins in a world that is vastly overpopulated, and extreme measures have been institutionalized to handle it. People live in tiny box apartments, homosexuality is the social norm (and it's policed), and everyone eats a protein mush as there just aren't enough damn cows in the world to handle the load. As you wrap your head around this world (seems like it would be easier to just castrate people instead of implemented totalitarian fabulousness), Burgess throws a curve ball and suddenly society collapses. 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.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. 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. The threat to reproductive freedom in dystopian novels is often used as a metaphor for wider social freedoms. The principle of family life being free from intervention by governments is a major element in discussions about human rights. Dystopian fiction often questions the limits of state power, and it contributes to ongoing debates about how many new lives should (or should not) be created, to ensure the future happiness of all citizens.

Pelphase is named after Pelagianism, the theology of Pelagius. The Pelphase is characterised by the belief that people are generally good. Crimes have slight punishment, and the government tries to improve the population. The government works through socialism. According to Tristram "A government functioning in its Pelagian phase commits itself to the belief that man is perfectible, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is along a straight road." The novel begins – and ends – in Pelphase. 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.Old Gus in the Mail Room, in which Ron was a runner, called it - leering - a BY-HAND. So wise-guy Ron learned to leer knowingly too. He considered himself Wiser than other Goody-goody Simpletons. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Wanting_Seed_-_Anthony_Burgess.pdf, The_Wanting_Seed_-_Anthony_Burgess.epub Shipped off with other British Army soldiers to the front, Tristram is convinced that the whole war is a sham. When trench fighting erupts between Tristram's men and "the enemy," his worst fears are confirmed. He became a full-time writer in 1959 and achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the most versatile novelists of his day. His writings include biographies of Shakespeare and Hemingway, critical studies of James Joyce, stage plays, and two volumes of autobiography. His work as a composer and librettist includes the Broadway musical, Cyrano, and Blooms of Dublin, an operetta based on Joyce's Ulysses.

Burgess once said, "I have spent the last 25 years thinking that The Wanting Seed could, in my leisurely old age, be expanded to a length worthy of the subject." A wondrous, but flawed, novel. You truly get a sense of this sprawling world, and the journey chapters are very effective. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. One of the most significant utopian works in the Foundation’s collection is Walden Two by the Harvard psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who was one of the pioneers of behaviourism. Skinner’s novel, published in 1948, is a utopian manifesto in the polemical tradition of Thomas More and William Morris.

Dystopias: The Wanting Seed and the politics of fertility:

The Right Hon. Robert Starling – the effete but harassed Prime Minister of the English-Speaking Union during the initial Pelphase and subsequent Gusphase eras. Retires to comfortable exile while awaiting the political and social wheel to turn again in his favor. 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 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 of the present. Further research into the book collection will allow us to investigate the sources of Burgess’s writing in more detail, and to establish new connections between the books on his shelves and the works which emerged from his typewriter. Gusphase is named after Augustinianism, the theology of St. Augustine of Hippo. In short, Gusphase involves the lifting of the Interphase. The leaders begin to realise how horrible they have become, and realise that they are being overly harsh. Therefore, the government relaxes its rules and creates havoc. Tristram describes the Gusphase: The Wanting Seed] is wildly and fantastically funny. …Here too is all the usual rich exuberance of Mr. Burgess's vocabulary, his love of quotations and literary allusions--the book ends with a quotation from Valery--his fantastic dream and nightmare sequences. …a remarkable and brilliantly imaginative novel, vital and inventive."

Overpopulation and the technology of human reproduction have often been the focal points of the futuristic fiction. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World reproduction is controlled by the state by outlawing reproductive sex and cultivating embryos in test tubes. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four sex between unmarried couples is outlawed, and we see the threatening presence of the ‘Anti-Sex League’. Yes, the love story was clumsy, but t served the purpose of showing this world's dichotomy and hypocrisy, his wife leaving him for a fake gay man, being cursed in either worlds for asking questions and being against the establishment no matter who is in charge. The final payoff of the book wasn't as great as the sum of its parts.The title comes from an old English folk song. This confuses ‘wanting’ and ‘wanton’. The ambiguity is appropriate to my book. But where the novel really succeeds is representing how each authoritarian figure in the novel grasps almost mindlessly at the next perfect doctrine for controlling the world, be it a general whose only understanding of war is through old movies and the War Poets (a man of many famous first lines) or Tristram's brother, who callously jumps onto each new moral ideal, going from a leader in the INFERTILITY POLICE, needing to hide his illegitimate children in fear of being arrested, to a higher-up in the FERTILITY POLICE, now using those same bastard children as a method of advancing his career. 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.