The Wanting Seed could be described as a Malthusian comedy, for its underlying theme is the problem the whole world may soon have to face--over-population--and its technique is fantasy and caricature. The setting is England (one of the chief members of Enspun or the English-Speaking Union) and the time is less the future than a sort of extension of the present.

The story is concerned with the vicissitudes of Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna in their skyscraper world of spacelessness where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality ("It's Sapiens to be Homo") and which is eventually transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

"[The Wanting Seed] is wildly and fantastically funny. …Here too is all the usual rich exuberance of Mr. Burgess's vocabulary, his love of quotations and literary allusions--the book ends with a quotation from Valery--his fantastic dream and nightmare sequences. …a remarkable and brilliantly imaginative novel, vital and inventive."
-- Times Literary Supplement