How Yevgeny Zamyatin shaped dystopian fiction

Reading his back story makes this even more interesting, given that he was living in a totalitarian state. I'd recommend reading his Wikipedia entry too.

In short: highly recommended reading.

Forgive me if I am reading too much into this, but the tagline for this article feels weird to me. It feels weird because it implies that the "worlds" of Wells, Huxley, and Orwell were without flaw. Was western civilization in the early 20th century really without flaw? Isn't every great dystopian work essentially a thought experiment where the author analytically deducts the endgame of the most pathological tendencies of the society they belong to? I get where they are coming from, but I think this idea that America was perfect in the earth 20th century really needs to be fought against. Don't get me wrong, there were many great things that happened during that period of time, but implying that it was without flaw makes the dystopian conversation about nationality rather than the universality of human imperfection and how that is reflected in the greater society, often insidiously.

Anyways, I'm definitely going to pick up a copy of 'We' after reading this. I love dystopian novels and had no idea 'We' was the originator. I think the idea of dystopia is closely related to science fiction, both could be considered a subset of stories that project what the future or some alternate timeline might be like. I think the really cool thing about dystopian stories is that they can act as a sort of crystal ball where humanity can glimpse a gestalt of its potential future and make decisions based on that. For example, in Lord of the Rings, Frodo is shown visions of the Shire should he fail his mission. These visions provide a deep sense of motivation for Frodo's grueling mission to Mount Doom, and without the memory of his love for the Shire (which was reinforced by Samwise towards the end) it's likely that Frodo would have succumbed to the power of the ring and failed to destroy it. I think that 1984, Brave New World, War of the Worlds, We, and novels like this perform a similar function for the collective conscious of humanity. The only difference is that we are all collectively Frodo's and Sam's, the one ring is our own self-destructive pathology, and the Shire is the purity of conscious creation from which we originally emerged.