I don't know whether this is one of those books that I liked because I didn't like the hero, or whether I didn't like it because I didn't like the hero. I know I didn't like the hero.

We was written in the 1920s and was, essentially, the first dystopian novel. I enjoyed We and I can see how it was the first of many: all others that I’ve read do seem to echo it. I’m glad I read it. But I didn’t love reading We. To me it seemed overly “scientific” and political, and it was rather depressing overall. I suspect many books about dystopian societies are sad, but this one didn’t grasp me as others have.

More detailed review on my blog

Zamyatin's original dystopian novel is most recently translated by Natasha Randall. Of the thousand images/metaphors Zamyatin employs, my favorite is glass. His dystopia is a walled city made entirely of transparent glass which separates people from the natural world. (All those ellipses ... and unfinished sentences are part of Zamyatin's writing style.)

"... a section of the circular street at the foot of the Green Wall. From the boundless green ocean behind the Wall, a wild tidal surge of roots, flowers, twigs, leaves was rolling toward me, standing on its hind legs, and had it flowed over me I would have been transformed from a person -- from the finest and most precise of mechanism -- into ...
"But, happily, between me and this wild, green ocean was the glass of the Wall. Oh, the great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They may just be the greatest of all inventions. Mankind ceased to be savage when we built the Green Wall, when we isolated our perfect, machined world, by means of the Wall, from the irrational, chaotic world of the trees, birds, animals ... " (82-3)

Also his mathematic metaphors remind me of black holes and dark energy in space -- we know of them only through the reality of some math formulas:
"...I don't know: which is dream and which is reality. Irrational quantities are sprouting through everything solid, usual, and three-dimensional, and instead of hard, polished planes, something gnarled and shaggy is surrounding me ...
"To every equation, to every formula in the surface world, there is a corresponding curve or mass. We don't know the corresponding masses to irrational formulas, to my square root of minus one -- we haven't ever seen them...But the very horror of it all is that these masses -- invisible masses -- do exist. They necessarily, inevitably must exist because mathematics is like a screen on which the whimsical, prickly shadows of irrational formulas cross before us. Mathematics and death: neither makes mistakes. And if these masses are not evident in our world, on the surface, then it's inescapable: they must have their own entire, enormous world there, behind the surface... " (90)

If you like 1984 and BNW, read on. ( )

Written in 1921, We foresaw Stalinism & the communist tendency to see people in statistical terms. Obviously a huge influence on Orwell & Huxley. It shows a great psychological understanding of living under totalitarianism. Stylistically it is interesting & part of the Russian avant garde of the time, but towards the end of the novel it becomes rather hyperbolic, which reduces the impact of the conclusion a little (a conclusion Orwell clearly remembered & learnt from). ( )