Yevgeny Zamyatin

We (eBook, ePUB)

100th Anniversary Edition

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The groundbreaking dystopian novel that inspired 1984 and Brave New World. "The best single work of science fiction yet written." -Ursula K. Le Guin When society has programmed you to sleep... How do you wake yourself up? The One State is a world where people are merely numbers, and free will itself is a disease. Most are happy in their role as cogs in a huge machine, controlled by the ever-watchful Benefactor. However, on the eve of the launch of the Integral-the spacecraft that will impose the One State's way of life everywhere-starship architect D-503 meets I-330, a female number as irreverent as she is beautiful. The Benefactor has quantified human experience, circumscribed edit, reduced it to nothing but a series of mathematical equations-that is, until one man tries to factor in the ultimate unknown: love. Before Huxley. Before Orwell. There was Zamyatin. Discover it for yourself today. Bonus: includes Zamyatin's famous "Death Sentence Appeal" letter to Stalin, and "Love Is the Function of Death" a bold new essay by noted science fiction author, reviewer, and scholar Paul Di Filippo. "How could I have missed one of the most important dystopias of the 20th century?... I was amazed by it." -Margaret Atwood "One of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age." -George Orwell

Produktdetails

• Verlag: WordFire Press
• Seitenzahl: 268
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Februar 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781680572070
• Artikelnr.: 61618055

Autorenporträt

Born in Russia in 1884, Yevgeny Zamyatin was one of those courageous and idealistic Communists who was willing to suffer for speaking out against the abuses of both the oppressive Tsarist monarchy and the quickly corrupted Soviet Union which supplanted it. As an early Bolshevik, Zamyatin enjoyed-at least initially-enough credibility after the October Revolution to continue to write philosophy and even political satire, becoming one of the first Soviet dissidents. This ended with his attempted publication in 1921 of his masterpiece, We, a novel about a futuristic police state that controlled not only every action of its citizens, but every thought and emotion as well. The parallels between his fictional One State and the emerging totalitarianism of the Communist Party were unmistakable, and We was the first work to be banned by the Soviet censorship board. Forced to look elsewhere for an audience, Zamyatin smuggled his work out of Russia and published it in the West. As a result, he was blacklisted entirely, and hence, to remain a writer, Zamyatin was forced to leave Russia. His petition for an exit visa to Stalin was granted (some say miraculously), though he never achieved the fame or genius outside Russia he had known within it. Zamyatin died in relative obscurity in Paris in 1937, five years after the publication of Brave New World, and twelve years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, two derivative works which would cement Zamyatin's place as one of the most influential authors of all time.