I went into Zamyatin’s ‘We’ predicting it to be a five star, it being the dystopian that inspired ‘1984’: my favourite book. I was not at all disappointed. ‘We’ depicts a future ‘utopian’ society where everybody lives in perfect happiness in entirely structured days, but in the trend of supposedly utopian worlds the reality is overwhelmingly dystopian. The governance of OneState has citizens with no agency nor identity, only known as a number, and an election system where all unanimously agree to vote in the same Benefactor publicly, resulting in punishment if he is voted against yet the level of indoctrination is so great all conform anyhow. 

‘We’ seems to have done more than inspire ‘1984’. So many elements of each dystopia were strikingly similar, from character roles and arcs to the worldbuilding and some overlaps in plot line, but was just different enough to the extent I was more than satisfied with each text standing on its own two feet. I was however very taken aback by how much Orwell was influenced by, ‘We’ writing in opposition to the soviet state Zamyatin lived under and therefore even author motivations overlapping, I couldn’t help but be slightly disheartened that all these overlaps slightly negate Orwell’s individual creativity and genius, for frankly it was not particularly individual. 

Maybe it was that personal bias that just stopped ‘We’ from being five stars, but it didn’t seem quite there. I loved the themes and world building, found myself in visible shock at the twists and the sense of futility throughout the book is a feeling I really enjoy and think is so great to analyse and painfully realistic. I did however find the protagonist D-503 a little flat and the plot was told through his records that he took almost alike to a diary, therefore there were parts that did feel a little distanced, limiting the effectiveness of the plot in areas. The descriptions of R-13, the only minority character, really weren’t great either. Hence’ We’ had some limitations that I feel Orwell bettered, but in almost rivalling ‘1984’ in my enjoyment of a futile dystopian is a huge credit given how highly I commend the book that ‘We’ helped to create.