Burgess once said, "I have spent the last 25 years thinking that The Wanting Seed could, in my leisurely old age, be expanded to a length worthy of the subject."

Very much alike at first, Derek chose a different path from Tristram and pretends to be homosexual while in public, to help his career as a government official.

Life changes as the largely homosexual police ('greyboys') become more repressive, and a mysterious blight spreads across the world threatening food supplies.

While he is imprisoned, formerly repressed religion begins to bloom, fertility rituals are endorsed, and the structure of society, as well as government, undergoes radical transformation.

She stays there until she delivers her twin sons, when members of the Population Police arrive to take her and her children to the city.

His journey eventually takes him to a sort of soup kitchen, where he enlists in the newly recreated army, which has replaced the (largely eaten) greyboys and Population Police.

In his first battle he discovers that there is no real enemy; the purpose of the "war" is population control by winnowing out the socially expendable.

Companies, led by junior officers trained to recite patriotic verse, are sent to a made-up Western Front style battlefield to kill each other.

Every other member of his unit is shot down as they emerge from their trench, but Tristram slips through the barbed wire surrounding the miniature war zone and begins his journey back to England.

The book closes with a translation of the final stanza of the French poet Paul Valéry's poem 'Le Cimetière marin'.

As Tristram explains things, the government grows increasingly disappointed in its population's inability to be truly good, and thus police forces are strengthened and the state becomes Totalitarian.