Puma

by Anthony Burgess

Puma - disentangled from the three-part structure of The End of the World News and published here for the first time in its intended format - is Anthony Burgess's lost science fiction novel. Set some way into the future, the story details the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy - the dreaded Puma. It is a visceral book about the end of history as man has known it. Despite its apocalyptic theme, its earthquakes and tidal waves, murder and madness, Puma is a gloriously-comic novel, steeped in the rich literary heritage of a world soon to be extinguished and celebrating humanity in all its squalid glory. In Burgess's hands this meditation on destruction, mitigated by the hope of salvation for a select few, becomes powerful exploration of friendship, violence, literature and science at the end of the world.

328 pages, Hardcover

Published September 28, 2018

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).

He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .

Reviews

[James Pomar]

A fun end of the world story. I haven’t read any Burgess is a few years, and coming back to him now, his work is starting to show its age a bit. He’s still a lot of fun to read, but this Sci Fi written in the 1970’s about the year 2000, now read in 2018, feels very much OF the 1970’s.

Still, a lot of fun, one of his better minor works.

[Ian]

Culled from the The End of the World News and restored to its original format, this was a movie script that never was, and as it turns out from this distance in time, an apocalypse that never happened. It starts off feeling that Burgess was paid to write it (which he was), but that later he puts his heart and soul into the hack job as the world nears its end. All human life is here, but not all of it will get on the spaceship to transport chosen survivors to new life somewhere in the cosmos. An interesting work for sci-fi fantasists, apocalypse theorists and Burgess completists, but it felt dated and clicheed to me.