Meet D-503, presumably D to his friends as these really seem to be the only names people have; it's not like he's Chad at weekends or anything. He is a resident (a "cipher" in their terminology) of the One State, a totalitarian regime that has sprung up in the wake of a planet-scouring apocalypse of the usual sort - or, I suppose, maybe the One State already existed and brought about the planet-scouring apocalypse as a means of eradicating rival states. Anyway, whatever, the population of the planet has been reduced to some small percentage of its previous level (the text is a bit slippery with terminology so there's some disagreement over whether this means 20%, 2%, 0.2% or something else) and the boundaries of the One State are delimited by some pretty serious walls to keep the usual hairy-tentacled mutant hordes out.
The usual totalitarian rules apply here: everyone lives in apartments with semi-transparent walls so no-one can get up to any nefarious business without other people knowing about it, outside of the regular scheduled sex visits from one's designated fuck-buddy to keep morale up and perpetuate the species. Everyone must be seen to contribute to the public good, otherwise you may attract the attention of the various enforcers of the State's will, a thing you really don't want to do. That attention culminates in gruesome public executions of those ciphers deemed to be beyond redemption.
D-503 is all right, though, being a high-ranking scientist and mathematician and chief engineer of the Integral, a spaceship being built to facilitate the expansion of the One State and the exertion of its will to other planets. In his downtime D-503 enjoys some nice commitment-free sex - at pre-approved times and locations only, of course - with his designated partner O-90.
So that's all pretty sweet and only an idiot could fuck it up, right? Well, enter I-330, a free-spirited and unconventional woman much given to inappropriate flirting, smoking and drinking (both prohibited) for whom D-503 has an instant uggghh/phwoarrr revulsion/attraction thing and finds himself arranging clandestine meetings with at the Ancient House, a sort of Museum Of The Before Times which has actual walls and is therefore used by political agitators as a secret base. During one of these meetings a secret tunnel is revealed which lead to the world outside the Wall, a lush green (though possibly slightly radioactive) paradise where recognisable humans and more exotic hairy hominids live in apparent peace and harmony.
Back inside the city D-503's slightly erratic behaviour is causing some awkward questions to be asked, and more generally there are rumblings of societal upheaval and small acts of civic disobedience among the ciphers. To combat this the people in charge have come up with a great scheme: troubled by intrusive thoughts of an independent and questioning nature? Come in to one of our re-orientation centres where these thoughts will be removed from you via our new and wholly benign free operation which will induce calm and untroubled thoughts by the simple application of a few hundred volts to your frontal lobes. And the best part is it's completely voluntary, by which we mean obligatory.
Opting out of the first wave of willing victims trooping into the re-orientation centres to be lobotomised, D-503 takes the Integral on its maiden flight, which is disrupted by I-330 and her associates; this does give D-503 pause to wonder whether she was just using him to gain access to the rocket. No time for too much thinking about that, though, as the craft returns to earth and everyone is arrested. D-503 confesses everything and is allowed to live on in a state of bovine compliance after having the Operation; I-330 refuses to rat out her co-conspirators and is publicly executed. Meanwhile civil unrest continues, the Wall is breached and some people are inconvenienced by hooting gibbons in the course of their daily duties. Can peace and order be restored, or is the One State doomed?
It's literally impossible to do any background reading around material relating to We (i.e. before actually reading the book) that doesn't prominently mention its influence on later works such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four - for context, We was first published in 1924, Brave New World in 1932 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. I should say at this point that my memories of Brave New World are fairly hazy as it's probably thirty years since I read it, but the setting of We - bright science-y utopia with the harsher totalitarian stuff bubbling beneath the surface - is probably closer to Brave New World than to Nineteen Eighty-Four's grimy setting and everyone existing on a diet of cabbage and gin. That said, there are some clear plot parallels in Nineteen Eighty-Four, most obviously the mild-mannered central male character being led astray by a bolshy and unconventional female love interest (I-330 here, Julia there) in a way that leads to their mutual downfall.
So you can chalk up another book on this list most of whose action occurs after some vaguely-described apocalypse, in this case (as in many others) probably nuclear. An informal and probably incomplete list can be found at the end of the Fiskadoro review. It's fascinating to compare We with the better-known books that came after and clearly derived some influence from it, but it's a fascinating novel in its own right as well, and of course Zamyatin's experience of the sort of regime being described and satirised here was a bit more direct than either Huxley or Orwell's, since he lived through the birth of the Soviet Union and had publication of We forbidden there until long after his death. Possibly for that reason We leans a bit more into the satire and blackly wry humour than either of the two other books.
My Vintage paperback comes, in a somewhat bizarre sales gimmick, with a supposedly 3-D cover with a pair of 3-D glasses attached. At least it says they're included on the cover, but I can't remember whether I actually got a pair when I acquired the book (as a Christmas or birthday present I think). As a consequence I can't tell you whether the faces and text on the cover loom out at you in an alarming fashion when you put the glasses on, but I did not find that this had very much bearing on my enjoyment of the book, luckily.
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