A Clockwork Orange is a speculative fiction novel by Anthony Burgess, published in 1962, and was later the basis for a 1971 film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. The novel was chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Plot introduction Explanation of the novel's title Anthony Burgess wrote that the title was a reference to an alleged old Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange".¹ Due to his time serving in the British Colonial Office in Malaysia, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used punningly to refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) human (orang, Malay for "person"). Burgess wrote in his later (Nov. 1986) introduction, titled A Clockwork Orange Resucked, that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color a