Anthony Burgess

[Dave]

John Anthony Burgess Wilson
pen name: Anthony Burgess, John Burgess Wilson and Joseph Kell.

born Manchester, England: 25 February 1917
died London, England: 22 November 1993

Anthony Burgess was an English author of fiction (primarily comic fiction) novels and a composer, who composed 250 musical works. He was also a critic, librettist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist, and educationalist. He was a specialist in the works of Shakespeare and James Joyce.

Despite this, he is still best known for his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange (1962) which was adapted into the controversial film of the same name by Stanley Kubrick in 1971 (and which Burgess said was directly responsible for the popularity of the book).

The book is set in a near-future society with a violent youth subculture. Narrated by the teenage Alex, it uses much slang called Nadsat, which Burgess created. Nadsat combines modified Slavic words, Cockney rhyming slang, and Russian, meant to be impenetrable to outsiders. The first edition offered no key for terms like droog, moloko, gulliver, malchick, soomka, Bog; horrorshow, prestoopnick, rooker, cal, veck, litso, and malenky.

The neologism, ultraviolence, was also coined by Burgess in the book, to mean excessive or unjustified violence.

Burgess is also known for his non-SFF The Malayan Trilogy, comprising of Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) and Beds in the East (1959).

Among his other SF works are The Wanting Seed (1962), another satire set in a dystopian world; The Eve of Saint Venus (1964), tales of Venus brought back to life; and the weird The End of the World News (1982).

I find it extremely odd that given the popularity and the controversiality of A Clockwork Orange, both the book and film, for its violence; given the literary inventiveness of the word-play within the book; and given the fact that it regularly appears in lists of 'must read' SFF books, that we had no existing individual threads on SFF Chronicles either for the book, film or for Burgess himself (they are obviously mentioned in many other posts.)

A list of his works is to be found here: Summary Bibliography: Anthony Burgess

Wikipedia page: Anthony Burgess - Wikipedia

 

[BAYLOR]

Ive read A Clock Work Orange. a good read Ive seen Kubrick's film and dislike it.

 

[Dave]

Ive seen Kubrick's film and dislike it.

Do you want to add a reason why? It's a reasonably faithful adaptation. The violence is very tame compared to more modern films, even some just a few years later. It does lose much of the humour of the book which was a satire, but the book is just as violent. When I was young and films were banned or given X certificates, my peers would only see that as a challenge, so banning the film only gave it more notoriety, and certainly increased the sales of the book, which even Burgess acknowledged.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

I read The Wanting Seed last year, it's been reprinted. I think the editor was trying to cash in on the anti-woke outcry, because TWS seemed designed to upset modern-day sensibilities with its warning that the State will force us all to become gay for the greater good of society

What I found most interesting was Burgess' theory of civilizational cycles. Burgess was a political conservative and wary of triumphalist narratives about the march of progress and the power of rationality. He counters that view with an illustration of civilization alternating between periods high on optimism, atheism and faith in technology and science, and periods that revert to tribalism, religion and belief in magic. Twenty years ago I'd have found this merely a fun exercise, but since then I've seen the cycles change, so I guess Burgess was prescient.