BURGESS, Anthony

   Working name of UK writer and composer John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-1993), known primarily for his work outside the sf field; as a composer he has worked under his full name. Trained in English literature and phonetics, AB taught at home and in Malaysia 1946-60, then returned to the UK (though he has since moved to Monaco) and became a full-time Protean man of letters, novelist, musician, composer and specialist in Shakespeare and James Joyce. Devil of a State (1961), set in an imaginary caliphate, skirts sf displacement, and several subsequent novels engage in linguistic flirtations with modes of FABULATION, but AB remains best known in the sf field for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962; with final chapter cut 1963 US), which was filmed by Stanley KUBRICK as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971). A compelling and often comic vision of the way violence comes to dominate the mind, the novel is set in a future London and is told in a curious but readable Russified argot by a juvenile delinquent whose brainwashing by the authorities has destroyed not only his murderous aggression but also a deeper-seated sense of humanity (typified by his compulsive love for the music of Beethoven). It is an ironic novel in the tradition of Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's and George ORWELL's anti- UTOPIAS; much later, AB adapted the book as a play to be accompanied by his own music, publishing the result as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1987 chap). His other early sf novel is The Wanting Seed (1962), a DYSTOPIAN investigation of the dilemmas facing men who wish to curb the population explosion by every means possible (OVERPOPULATION).The Eve of Saint Venus (1964), perhaps inspired by F. ANSTEY's The Tinted Venus (1885), sympathetically brings the eponymous goddess back to life. "The Muse" (1968), a story of altered PERCEPTION and TIME TRAVEL, offers an alarming explanation for Shakespeare's never having blotted a line. Beard's Roman Women (1976 US), a fantasy, is the melancholy tale of a widowed writer haunted in Rome by the supernatural presence (and insistent telephone calls) of his deceased wife. Two genuine sf novels followed: 1985 (1978), which is divided into a competent essay on Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) and a blustering sf tale set in a 1985 dominated by Arabs and left-wing unions; and The End of the World News (1983), again a book divided but this time in three, with a short life of Sigmund Freud jostling a Broadway musical (without the music) about Leon Trotsky, both tales being filmed and viewed long afterwards aboard a spaceship which - in the third segment of the main narrative - has escaped the END OF THE WORLD just before a wandering planet strikes the rest of us dead. These novels both give off a sense of underlying sarcasm which has, perhaps, as much to do with AB's disdain for sf as with the tales' ostensible targets. Any Old Iron (1989), a treatment of Arthurian material in a contemporary context, was similarly distempered. AB has written little short fiction; some of the stories in his first collection, The Devil's Work (coll 1989), are of genre interest.

   MJ/JC

   Other works: A Long Trip to Teatime (1976).

   About the author: The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (1978 chap) by Richard Mathews; Anthony Burgess: An Enumerative Bibliography (1980) by Jeutonne Brewer; Anthony Burgess (1981) by Samuel Coale.

   See also: LINGUISTICS; MUSIC; PSYCHOLOGY; QUEST FOR FIRE.