All construction within is also of glass, both a technological achievement and a means of ensuring every citizen may be observed. OneState is a single city, surrounded by an impenetrable glass wall, the Green Wall. Why does D-503 consider OneState perfect? It is the twenty-sixth century OneState is two hundred years old, and followed two hundred years of war that killed the vast majority of Earth’s population. And we do not and will not solicit you we neither need nor accept money. If you subscribe will get a notification of all new writings by email. In these days of massive censorship, this is wise, even if you normally consume The Worthy House on some other platform. You can subscribe to writings published in The Worthy House. But D-503’s journal turns out to be, without his intent, a journal of his awakening.

He decides to simply record what he sees around him, because what he sees is the “mathematically perfect life of OneState.” To speak of it is to herald its perfection. D-503, along with other members of the citizenry, has been ordered by the Benefactor to create intellectual cargo for INTEGRAL, to be delivered to inhabitants of other planets in order to propagate the ideology of OneState. D-503 is a citizen of OneState, under the absolute rule of, apparently, one man, the Benefactor.

He is a mathematician and the Chief Engineer of a spaceship, named INTEGRAL, being prepared for imminent launch to explore Venus, Mars, and beyond. We is written as a journal of sorts, the stream of consciousness of a man named D-503. I warn you now, this entire review is one big spoiler. And, crucially, its story ends with a lesson lacking in those other books, even though that lesson is, it appears, universally ignored by those who discuss this book. That is as it may be, but Zamyatin’s novel offers a third future, certainly a future more to the liking of today’s ruling class than either of those other futures. In fact, it is nearly a cliché, at least on the Right, that we are heading to some combination of the two, the only question being which our future society will resemble more, if we do not first overthrow the lords of the present age. True, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, both of which this book influenced, get more attention today. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, written in 1921, is the ur-dystopia of all modern dystopias.