You can subscribe to writings published in The Worthy House. But D-503’s journal turns out to be, without his intent, a journal of his awakening. He decides to simply record what he sees around him, because what he sees is the “mathematically perfect life of OneState.” To speak of it is to herald its perfection. D-503, along with other members of the citizenry, has been ordered by the Benefactor to create intellectual cargo for INTEGRAL, to be delivered to inhabitants of other planets in order to propagate the ideology of OneState. D-503 is a citizen of OneState, under the absolute rule of, apparently, one man, the Benefactor. He is a mathematician and the Chief Engineer of a spaceship, named INTEGRAL, being prepared for imminent launch to explore Venus, Mars, and beyond. We is written as a journal of sorts, the stream of consciousness of a man named D-503. I warn you now, this entire review is one big spoiler. And, crucially, its story ends with a lesson lacking in those other books, even though that lesson is, it appears, universally ignored by those who discuss this book. That is as it may be, but Zamyatin’s novel offers a third future, certainly a future more to the liking of today’s ruling class than either of those other futures. In fact, it is nearly a cliché, at least on the Right, that we are heading to some combination of the two, the only question being which our future society will resemble more, if we do not first overthrow the lords of the present age.

True, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, both of which this book influenced, get more attention today. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, written in 1921, is the ur-dystopia of all modern dystopias.

My yevgeny zamyatin