The Wanting Seed (30 page)

—London
Times Literary Supplement

“This book is a warning to us to do whatever must be done to plan a sound future world, but it also chides us never, under any circumstances, to try to kill man’s need for love and fulfillment. . . . Good reading.”

—
Library Journal

The Wanting Seed
is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world that overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world of spacelessness where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality (“It’s Sapiens to be Homo”). This time of the near future is eventually transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic diningclubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without enemies.
The Wanting Seed
is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

ANTHONY BURGESS
is the author of
A Clockwork Orange, The Doctor Is Sick, Honey for the Bears, The Long Day Wanes, Nothing Like the Sun
, and
Re Joyce
, all available from Norton. Burgess died in 1993.

The title of this novel is the refrain from
the folk-song ‘The Wanton Seed’, collected
in James Reeves’s
The Everlasting Circle
.

Copyright © 1962 by Anthony Burgess
First American Edition 1963
First published as a Norton paperback 1976; reissued 1996

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 978-0-393-31508-0

ISBN 978-0-393-28572-7 (e-book)

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