'The best single work of science fiction yet written' Ursula K. Le Guin
A seminal work of dystopian fiction that foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin's Weis a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand.
In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction.
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval engineer by profession and writer by vocation, who made himself an enemy of the Tsarist government by being a Bolshevik, and an enemy of the Soviet government by insisting that human beings have absolute creative freedom. He wrote short stories, plays and essays, but his masterpiece is We, written in 1920-21 and soon thereafter translated into most of the languages of the world. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988.
If you enjoyed We, you might like George Orwell's 1984, also available in Penguin Classics.
"Zamyatin . . . did more than predict some of the specific characteristics of totalitarianism―he predicted its defining condition: the destruction of the individual. . . . [He] found the word for it: We." ―Masha Gessen, from the Foreword
"The best single work of science fiction yet written." --Ursula K. Le Guin
"[Zamyatin's] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism--human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself--makes [We] superior to Huxley's [Brave New World]." --George Orwell
"At this dystopian moment in world politics, everyone's talking about 1984, but take a look at the novel that inspired it (or, at least, which George Orwell reviewed soon before he wrote 1984)--Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. . . . The dystopia Zamyatin painted has, alas, many echoes with today's surveillance society--just think of China's budding 'social credit' program, which monitors citizens' movements. Big Brother was a piker, compared to Xi Jinping. Zamyatin saw it coming." --Lit Hub
