I can't say I loved this book, but it the writer's sense of irony was pretty entertaining. While We may not be the first dystopic, future vision, he certainly set the standard for this genre for decades. The narration is excellent, as is typical for Gardner with superb pacing, tone, and range of voices. Clearly, Zamyatin outlines in great details his fears and nightmares with the changing social and political events in his native land. D503 slowly loses his sense of reality, while the Onestate machine grinds ahead with plans to 'treat' people to eliminate imagination as a final solution to total population control. D503 is co-opted by I330 who is a woman with nefarious plans to overthrow the government.

The main character, D503, is working on a rocket ship, the Integral, that will search out intelligent life and spread the totalitarian word. Clearly, We served as the inspiration for Orwell's 1984, but is actually even bleaker and more dystopic than big brother. Onestate is located inside a walled region surrounded by primitive savages. Their days and nights are regimented with even pregnancies tightly controlled, all under the guiding hand of the Benefactor. People have letter/number names and wear specific colored uniforms. In this future, the totalitarian state, Onestate, is absolute. Written in the early 1920's the author projected what he expected was the logical extension of the then emerging and evolving Bolshevik revolution in his native country. Zamyatin's We is a dystopian sci-fi story set in the 26th century. Masterful dystopian future that predates 1984 Of course, all have different themes and draw different conclusions. Grover Gardner's narration is quite good.he doesn't really add anything to the story but he doesn't take anything away, either. Usually, I find such intros boring and low-value, but in this case, I found it helpful. The audio book starts with a fairly long and involved history of WE and its publication (and the various translations). The prose is a bit dated-it was written around 1920 and has very flowery internal narration and not a lot of dialog, and I started to find it getting tedious, until we got close to the end.

The story is presented as D305's personal journal. WE is one of the earliest examples of dystopian literature-you can see elements of WE in 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Anthem (Rand), Player Piano (Vonnegut) and many others. Rocket scientist D305 lives his clockwork life as expected until he meets and falls in love with the revolutionary I330. WE tells the story of the 'One State,' a sanitized, regimented world in which the individuals ('numbers'.nobody has a name) live sanitized, regimented lives. Interesting history, prose a little outdated

Yevgeni zamyatin