We
Yevgeny Zamyatin · first published 1924 · ISBN 9780063068445
D-503 is a citizen of the One State, a crystalline society where humans are numbered rather than named and every moment is regulated by the Table. He begins a secret diary that documents his attraction to a woman and his growing suspicion that the regime's mathematical perfection masks something rotten. Zamyatin's vision prefigures both Orwell and Huxley, combining elements both would later develop.
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The Best Dystopian Novels
Published in Russia in 1924 and smuggled west after suppression, We influenced Orwell and Huxley and deserves recognition as the prototype. Its fever-dream poetry and early statement of totalitarian logic make it both historically crucial and disturbingly strange.