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A review by sarahetc
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
5.0
In OneState, everything is almost perfect. The Benefactor rules. The INTEGRAL is getting ready to take the poems and prose of the Numbers to the Stars. The Numbers exist in as pure an existence as possible, inside their glass world, safe and secure from all uncertainty. D-503 knows this very well. He is the Builder of the INTEGRAL and he begins recording his own thoughts, that they might be transmitted to the stars to bring the perfection of the OneState to all the other worlds. This process is smooth, unhindered, and as perfect as everything else, until D-503 notices I-330.
And that's the ethos of Zamyatin's banned novel, a work that undergirds everything we know about dystopias and about science fiction as the literature of political dissent. It's a novel that, when you read the introduction of the translator and consider its history, is broken into two halves and given to the English-speaking world by English authors as 1984 and Brave New World. We is the seed of them both-- the terrifying, all seeing, everything State that controls each non-individual down to the minute as well as the frighteningly tender impersonality of the world, leading to the growth of the soul as a disease and terrible, state-enforced mutilation as its cure.
Horrible and wonderful and should be required reading.
And that's the ethos of Zamyatin's banned novel, a work that undergirds everything we know about dystopias and about science fiction as the literature of political dissent. It's a novel that, when you read the introduction of the translator and consider its history, is broken into two halves and given to the English-speaking world by English authors as 1984 and Brave New World. We is the seed of them both-- the terrifying, all seeing, everything State that controls each non-individual down to the minute as well as the frighteningly tender impersonality of the world, leading to the growth of the soul as a disease and terrible, state-enforced mutilation as its cure.
Horrible and wonderful and should be required reading.