We Were Liars

Author: E. Lockhart

In the early 1920s, the manuscript of Zamiatin's novel, We, was smuggled out of Soviet Russia to be published in the West. One of the people who reviewed that novel was George Orwell, who would later write his own version of the story in 1984. But the novel that came first, and according to some critics the better book, was We.The One State, a dictatorial world government, everyone lives and works in glass buildings so that the secret police can see everything that they do. Like Jeremy Bentham's idea of the Panopticon, everyone must behave because at any moment they might be under observation. It is a world where there is no such thing as individuality, everyone wears identical clothing and people are known only by numbers. D-503 is an engineer on the spaceship that is meant to carry the rule of the One State to other planets. He meets a woman, I-330, who is a free spirit disobeying the normal rules of the One State. D-503 is fascinated by her and so cannot bring himself to denounce her to the secret police. He finds himself drawn into a rebellion against the state, but after an operation that removes all human imagination and emotion he becomes a fervent devotee of the Great Benefactor. Why It Made the ListWeis one of the greatest of all dystopias, a wonderful novel that helped to inspire Brave New World, 1984 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. It is hard to imagine the dystopian fiction of the twentieth century without We.

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1984 by George Orwell, which you will find elsewhere on this list, is a novel whose details echo much of what occurs in We.