Just Finished Reading: The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (FP: 1962) [206pp] 

In a world of untold billions, the one-child policy was clear. No matter the circumstance, even if the child later died as he had, only one child could be born. She would spend the rest of her life childless. Not that her husband seemed put out by that. He had shown little interest in her since the birth and would show her even less now. It was no surprise that she found her brothers-in-law obvious attraction all the more compelling. But things in the outside world were changing. The daily ration had been reduced again and most people were often hungry. Rumours abounded of crop failures across the world followed by food riots and crackdowns. As famine spread across the globe Beatrice-Joanna did the only logical thing. She travelled north, away from collapsing London, to stay with her sister on her farm. With the hope of food and shelter and with a new, illegal, life growing inside her the future looks grim indeed. She has no idea how bad things are going to get... 

This was, to be honest, a weird one! 60’s SF is, more often than not, more than a little strange but this slim volume had the added ‘spice’ of being written by the author of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (which I tried to read some years ago but ended up DNFing it). Based in the usual projected – and now we know incorrect – heavily overpopulated world it showed the authorities, at least in Britain, struggling with the basic fact of too many mouths to feed. Not only is farming land at a premium but most sustenance is chemical slop produced in factories. There’s a one-child policy (not completely enforced for some reason), an official encouragement of homosexuality and a blind-eye turned to infanticide. None of this, as you might expect, had much effect on population growth. Interestingly the use of oral contraceptives had started in the US 2 years before publication and in the UK just prior to publication in December 1961, so I’m a bit curious as to why they failed to be mentioned – never mind used – to control population growth in the book. Even if personal use was restricted or just ignored by the general population it’d be quite easy to add it to food or water to radically reduce fertility. Likewise, they could just stop vaccinating people and let successive epidemics ‘thin the herd’. The fact that such methods were not used whilst crude propaganda was used certainly detracted from any feeling of realism. 

Some of the things that always ‘gets’ me in any kind of collapse scenario – which I think are nonsense over and above being narratively useful for the author – is how quickly any complex society falls, how quickly people turn to cannibalism (please!) and how quickly the general population declines. These are, I believe, simple narrative devices to reduce the plots complexity and decrease the total number of characters – both potential and actual – to reasonable proportions, plus they speed to transition from the original conditions to the new narrative. I think, and have long thought, this to be deeply unrealistic though. I think I need to read up on such things to see if my ‘reasonable assumptions’ actually hold water. 

Overall, this was a strange read on several levels. It was fairly well written, the main characters all had growth arcs which, in context, made a degree of sense but I think the story itself didn’t really ‘do’ it for me. Some of the underlying themes seemed silly at best and, at least to me, some were simply nonsensical. Readable but a little too weird.