A Century of Dystopia volume 2 - "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin

by Steve Shahbazian

Volume 2 – “We” by Yevgeny ZamyatinWritten after the Russian Revolution, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s seminal dystopia depicts a world far in the future, so regimented that people have numbers instead of names. We famously provided the inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four and all too often is judged in terms of Orwell’s more famous work. Once judged on its own merits, We emerges as an fascinating story in its own right.

In Zamyatin’s work, dystopia is a passionless mathematically rational paradise. Emerging out of the devastation of large-scale warfare almost a thousand years ago, One State faces its own apocalypse. For citizens, only two outcomes are the perfection of paradise or continued life. Who is it standing in the way of death? The much-reviled heretic.

Combining political, mathematical and thermodynamical themes, Zamyatin weaves a series of Biblical allusions – starting in a technological Garden of Eden and ending in a cosmic Armageddon – into a fable discussing his favourite themes of energy, entropy and revolution. Zamyatin’s fable is not merely a story about tyranny or revolution, it is a story about life and death. 

Volume 2 looks at We, the novel that prefigured Brave New World and inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four, providing the germ for the twentieth century dystopia.

The seriesVolume 1 – Why Dystopia?Volume 2 – “We” by Yevgeny ZamyatinVolume 3 – “Brave New World” by Aldous HuxleyVolume 4 – “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George OrwellVolume 5 – “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony BurgessVolume 6 – “High Rise” by J.G. BallardVolume 7 – “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret AtwoodVolume 8 – “Green and Pleasant Land” by Steve Shahbazian

78 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 31, 2019

About the author

Steve Shahbazian has won no awards, no competitions and isn't critically acclaimed. Some of his best friends have gone so far as to describe his work as “okay in places” and his books have been in huge demand, mostly due to the large number of wonky tables needing propping up...

Okay, okay, I wrote that. I'm sure you're all sick of writers bigging up their work, telling you how many awards they won and blah, blah, blah... seriously, how many bestsellers are there out there!?! For me, all that matters is writing original stories that you, dear reader, enjoy. For me, the reader is everything.

If you like a mixture of literary fiction, science fiction and political dystopian fiction with the occasional dark and disturbing twist, check out my writing. Who knows, you might like it.

Happy reading!