We
Yevgeny Zamyatin, c.1921

Premise
D-503 is a mathematician who lives in the One State, a far-future society in which individual freedom has been minimized and the "ciphers" who make up the population live their lives according to the Table of Hours.

Reaction
Couldn't finish. We was supposedly the major inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four, but whereas Orwell grounded his work by bringing to it the same journalistic voice he used to write his accounts of poverty in Britain, We is a stream of consciousne— no, make that a swamp of consciousness. Zamyatin disdained conventional language, and the translator of the edition I read attempted to preserve as much as possible of his eccentric style, full of abstractions, fragments, and sentences that trail off into nothing. It's unbearable.


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