The science fiction novel that destroyed socialism

How the socialist utopia was rewritten as totalitarian dystopia

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a novel written at the beginning of the future.

It’s hard to remember today, after Logan’s Run, The Handmaid’s Tale and Hunger Games made “dystopia” an entertainment genre, but when Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing in the early 1920s, it was only beginning to dawn on humanity just how bad the future might be.

Or how splendid.

Zamyatin’s science fiction novel invented the future we now think of as dystopia. A lone individual awakens to the oppressive system they are trapped within and attempts a rebellion. Sometimes they achieve liberation, but mostly they…do not. The details change, the dystopian future remains the same.

For most of human history there was no future. There was a date at a point ahead in time. But that date would be much like this date. Time was cyclical. Kings came and went, but there was always a king. The apocalypse or armageddon might strike, but those brought the end, not the future.

The future needs progress. Progress needs technology.

And technology needs science.