We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We is a dystopian science fiction novel that almost certainly inspired 1984 and Brave New World. Written by a Russian author in the early 20th centuries, it has the distinct honor of being the first novel censored by the Soviet literary review board.

We presents a society that is rigorously controlled and observed, with everything from work and food to people’s sex lives dictated by the state for the greater good. Also, there’s a rocket in it. Everything would be perfect apart from individuals and their imagination, which the society has built a machine to relatively painlessly remove.

Anyway, it’s the story of a worker who drifts into a resistance movement through his fascination with a young woman who continually breaks the rules. The whole thing is pretty bleak, but I liked reading this science fiction book from the early 20th century. Ultimately pretty apolitical, I could easily see the setting of this book mapped onto an extreme version of capitalism.

It was also quite interesting to see how the author imagined telephones being used in the future, as well as rockets.

That cover is something else, too!