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100th Anniversary Edition

ebook
82 of 82 copies available
82 of 82 copies available

The groundbreaking dystopian novel that inspired 1984 and Brave New World. “The best single work of science fiction yet written.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
 
When society has programmed you to sleep . . .
 
How do you wake yourself up?
 
The One State is a world where people are merely numbers, and free will itself is a disease. Most are happy in their role as cogs in a huge machine, controlled by the ever-watchful Benefactor.
 
However, on the eve of the launch of the Integral—the spacecraft that will impose the One State’s way of life everywhere—starship architect D-503 meets I-330, a female number as irreverent as she is beautiful.
 
The Benefactor has quantified human experience, circumscribed edit, reduced it to nothing but a series of mathematical equations—that is, until one man tries to factor in the ultimate unknown: love.
 
Before Huxley. Before Orwell. There was Zamyatin.
 
Discover it for yourself today.
 
Bonus: includes Zamyatin’s famous “Death Sentence Appeal” letter to Stalin, and “Love Is the Function of Death” a bold new essay by noted science fiction author, reviewer, and scholar Paul Di Filippo.
 
“How could I have missed one of the most important dystopias of the 20th century? . . . I was amazed by it.” —Margaret Atwood
 
“One of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” —George Orwell

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 17, 2006
      First published in the Soviet 1920s, Zamyatin's dystopic novel left an indelible watermark on 20th-century culture, from Orwell's 1984
      to Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil
      . Randall's exciting new translation strips away the Cold War connotations and makes us conscious of Zamyatin's other influences, from Dostoyevski to German expressionism. D-503 is a loyal "cipher" of the totalitarian One State, literally walled in by glass; he is a mathematician happily building the world's first rocket, but his life is changed by meeting I-330, a woman with "sharp teeth" who keeps emerging out of a sudden vampirish dusk to smile wickedly on the poor narrator and drive him wild with desire. (When she first forces him to drink alcohol, the mind leaps to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel
      .) In becoming a slave to love, D-503 becomes, briefly, a free man. In Randall's hands, Zamyatin's modernist idiom crackles ("I only remember his fingers: they flew out of his sleeve, like bundles of beams"), though the novel sometimes seems prophetic of the onset of Stalinism, particularly in the bleak ending. Modern Library's reintroduction of Zamyatin's novel is a literary event sure to bring this neglected classic to the attention of a new readership.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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