We

Yevgeny Zamyatin 1924

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
dystopian political love philosophical literary fiction

Our Take

The original dystopia, and still perhaps the bleakest. D-503 is the system celebrating itself until desire arrives and ruins him. Zamyatin wrote this as a warning about the Soviet state before it had fully revealed itself, and that prescience makes it feel less like fiction and more like prophecy.

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