Throughout his career, Anthony Burgess has written about possible futures. His most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), is also his most powerful prophecy of a possible future world. Burgess also wrote two more future-set novels, The Wanting Seed (1962) and 1985 (1978). A section of The End of the World News (1982) is also set in the future. There are many influences on Burgess’s futuristic fiction, including Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin, but it is arguably George Orwell who inspired Burgess the most. Burgess’s engagement with Orwell is evident from the following article, originally written for the Glasgow Herald in 1983 as a reflection on literary prophecy.

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