“I am completely bewildered. Yesterday, at the very moment when I thought that everything was already disentangled, that all the X’s were found, new unknown quantities appeared in my equation”

* Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’ is, as it’s 2012 Harper Voyager edition states, a page-turning SF adventure that predated Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984’. I personally had never heard of ‘We’ until one day I started researching obscure Russian science fiction novels online and strangely came upon ‘Utz’ by Bruce Chatwin—which I don’t believe is science fiction or Russian, I haven’t read it so I can’t say—and Zamyatin’s novel. It’s clear, after reading ‘We’, that Huxley and Orwell were biting Zamyatin’s ass, or jacking his swag, when they wrote and published their own novels. Yet, I ask myself, who—in their right mind—would not take every opportunity to mimic this epic 232 paged book? It follows the journal entries of D-503, the primary builder of the ‘Integral’, which in 120 days will be completed and will take flight to extraterrestrial planets so to “subjugate the unknown beings […] who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason.” But D-503 meets a woman—like they say in Spanish, “al azar”—named I-330, who starts putting thoughts of a different world into his head, and this is when/where things start to change…! This book was incredibly good and I can confirm it is a page turner. I would recommend it to everyone. The adventure is insane, but even just the literal words are as insane. Take this opening paragraph of D-503’s 23rd entry as an example, “It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never knew about them simply because this ‘once in a thousand years’ has come only today?”