"In a utopian future society, where all social unrest has been engineered away, a man has an awakening. Starting as a happy worker drone, he meets a woman who reveals to him the reality of life outside the state's control - the glories of chaotic nature in the world and in the heart. They become entwined with a conspiracy against the state, and eventually try to escape beyond the walls of the state's control... only to meet betrayal, failure, and a dark ending in the glorious light of the state's total control.
Sound familiar? It's probably because you've read Orwell's nineteen eighty-four, which he wrote eight months after he read We, wrote a review of it, and said he was taking it as the model for his next novel. Or Huxley's Brave New World.
Or maybe you've read Vonnegut's Player Piano, which of Vonnegut said he 'cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We'. You might even have come across other plays on the theme, such as Ayn Rand's Anthem or Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, written while Nabakov was reading We. Or even possibly Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.
The tale is familiar, but the satirical and farcical comedy is a delight all of its own."
"'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a seminal dystopian novel set in a future totalitarian society where individuality is suppressed. The story follows D-503, a mathematician working on the spaceship Integral, who begins to question the regime through his relationship with the rebellious I-330. As he grapples with forbidden emotions and dreams of freedom, D-503's journey exposes the conflict between personal liberty and state control. Zamyatin's haunting narrative is a powerful critique of conformity and authoritarianism."
"We (Russian: Мы, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921.
The novel was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. It is believed that the novel had a huge influence on the works of Orwell and Huxley, as well as on the emergence of the genre of dystopia.
A few hundred years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship Integral is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project's chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship.
Like all other citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians. D-503's lover, O-90, has been assigned by One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life. O-90's other lover and D-503's best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions..."
"This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
In Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We,' D-503, an engineer in the future 'One State,' lives a meticulously planned life devoid of privacy and individuality. The glass-walled city ensures constant surveillance, and logic dictates their happiness. D-503, entrusted with building a spaceship to bring their system to other planets, encounters I-330, a rebel who awakens his suppressed emotions and the desire for freedom. Torn between loyalty and love, D-503 grapples with the state's control and the potential for a different, passionate existence."
