We

I was wading through one of the new bookstores in town (its tough not to delight in those extreme sales prices) and I found one of those books—you know, the kind you’ve been hearing about for years, but you’ve never actually sought out. Its called We, its by a man named Yevgeny Zamyatin, and its incredible. It was written in 1920/1921 by a Soviet who was critical of the state and was influential enough that Stalin let him immigrate, rather than just catch a serious case of the death. Its set around a thousand years in the future in an undetermined location. After a Two Hundred Year’s War in which the world population dropped by 8/10ths (one can only imagine between the First and Second Worlds), the surviving populace form the One State, a totalitarian political organization administered by the Great Benefactor whose aim is to form the perfect rational society. Humanity is on the verge of perfection, as defined in terms of becoming truly machinelike through the purge of imagination from the human brain. “Numbers,” as the citizens of this state are called, are identified as code terms: the narrator is D-503, his friends are O-90 and R-13, and I-330 is the source of most of the action. D-503 is the Builder, an engineer in charge of developing a starship (The Integral) that will allow humanity to spread its rationality across the face of the universe, rationalizing, by carrot or by stick, all sentient life they come across. There is no privacy (all buildings are made of glass), no property, and even human relationships are non-exclusive (all humans have a right to access, or have sex with, all other humans—they merely must apply through the One State).
The book itself is meant to be a journal, to be added to the databanks of The Integral. All humans on earth (apparently several hundred million) have been instructed to write literature vaunting the One State and rationalization. In the process of writing the journal, however, D-503 records his waning faith in the system, brought about by his infatuation with I-330. I must restrain myself from writing the whole plot out, but if I do, well, you might sleep at night. Consider:
I started reading it at about 5 or 6PM and couldn’t stop until almost 7 the next morning. It is amazing, like written caffeine—I wasn’t even tired. And, as a SciFi junkie, my recognition of its significance didn’t hurt. I mean, the influence We has had simply cannot be overstated. Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (both the Federation and the Bugs {Book NOT the Movie), Card’s Ender series, Herbert’s Dune series, Asimov’s Foundation series, Lucas’ THX-1138, Star Trek (both the Federation and the Borg), and Aeon Flux (judge by the series, not the movie) are all deeply in Zamyatin’s debt.

The best way I can characterize it—this will fall deeply short—is to say that We is a science fiction equivalent of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Its also vaguely, in some manner I’m not entirely sure of, reminiscent of Abbot’s 1884 Flatland. ‘Nuff said.

What to look for? The deification of humanity by virtue of removing anything lofty or moving from art in the Twelfth Entry, the discussion of fog in the Thirteenth Entry, D-503’s lauding of walls in the Seventeenth Entry, the Thirtieth Entry’s stark vilification of historicism and the notion of history as having an ‘end,’ the Thirty-First Entry’s discussion of rebellion as being the same as not wanting salvation (in the orthodox system), the any discussion of the concept of the square-root of –1.