The cover of this cheese-ball, spooky-font, mass-market paperback shouted it loud: “The most influential science fiction novel of the 20th century!”
I call bullshit.
If you were so good, I woulda heard of you. I’ve read my Wells, my Asimov, hunkered down with Herbert, done some galactic hitch-hiking, and even went through a phase of hiding away from lovely summer days with Spock and Kirk’s paperbacked adventures. They continued to go where no man has gone before. It seemed safer to stay inside.
But now that WE‘s been read, I was wrong.
Zamyatin rails against the inevitable abuses of the future utopian “One State” decades before Orwell and Huxley got a crack at it. And he does so in Russian. How’s that for cred? (Ain’t no regime as cold as the Soviet regime.) If your inner Tea Partier has run out of Rand, read this book before taking that third trip through Fountain Shrugged. Like Ayn, Zamyatin spends most of his time championing the individual. Unlike Ayn, he manages to create two-dimensional characters in the process. (I suppose that going for 3-D might have muddied the rhetorical waters too much.) After a few snippy remarks at the homogenizing evils of Christianity, he even ties in a thread of the Moulin-Rouge Bohemian in his revolutionary solution: Freedom, Beauty, Truth, Love!
And that’s where I hoped it would end. Darn Russo-Pessimism had to get in the way. But no spoilers here. Go forth, mighty self-sufficient one, and read it for yourself.
