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Anthony Burgess knew not what he was doing when he created the futuristic and dark novel, A Clockwork Orange in 1963. Yet,he has admitted that "It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers" (CO,p. xiv)

This work has been controversial from the beginning, and the film version was even moreso. His title comes from London slang and was used to indicate something that was at the extreme of weirdness, odd or inverted to an outlandish degree, and the reader can take it from there.

While the reader must slog through a horribly bleak vista of our future, she can also reach for the beauty and possibility which are dangled mischievously next to the vicious shennanigans of the devilish droogs and the mindless inhumanity of the "man." As a contemporary critic indicated "Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty little shocker, but is really that rare thing in English letters: a philosophical novel.