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Wiki Headlines 5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here Main YMMV main index Narrative
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![]() One of many equally bleak covers. And I'm convinced that in the end we will prevail. Because Reason must prevail. One of the earliest known Dystopia novels, written by Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1921 and predating both Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which it directly inspired. It's also notable for being the first work banned by Goskomizdat, not published in the Soviet Union until 1988, and some parts of the description of the One State read as scaringly similar to Stalinism — eight years before it began to take shape. (The Soviets especially didn't like the book's implication that theirs was not the final, destined-for-success revolution.)The entire book is a fictional diary written by the protagonist, D-503, a citizen of the totalitarian One State * ruled by a Big Brother-like figure known as the Benefactor. People are called "numbers" and lead a highly math- and logic-centered (read: Straw Vulcan) existence. Everything is arranged via rigid timetables, down to sex — and because sex is brought down to a purely logical activity, Eternal Sexual Freedom is the norm. "Every number", the Benefactor states, "belongs to every other number" — and monogamy and irrational love are strongly discouraged as a result.D-503 regularly has sex with O-90, a very sweet woman who delights in his presence. He shares her with his best friend, the state poet R-13. One day, D-503 is approached by another woman: I-330, a member of La Résistance called the Mephi, whom he falls madly in love with. He starts to realize that his sexual and intellectual connection to O-90 is dwindling quickly. And when R-13 starts secretly meeting the mysterious I-330 as well, D-503 begins to feel something he's never experienced before: jealousy, emotional love, a desire for monogamy and privacy, and a yearning for the unknown.I-330 shows him the world outside the Green Wall encircling the city-state: beginning with "The Ancient House", a state museum, and eventually moving on to the lush wilderness outside the city dome. However, as the Mephi push towards the city and chaos erupts on the streets, D-503 is caught and subjected to the recently discovered "Great Operation": removal of the imagination, causing him to revert to his original calculating self, as he calmly writes about I-330 being executed in front of his eyes. The ending is ambiguous about the eventual fate of the One State itself: although D-503 and all of the State's citizens have been brainwashed irrevocably, the last of the Mephi and the feral humans outside the dome are still waiting for their chance to strike. And it is very firmly stated that no revolution is final.Eight months after reading We, George Orwell sat down and started writing Nineteen Eighty-Four as a direct cultural translation of the story. Both Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut (who based Player Piano on We) have accused Aldous Huxley of stealing the plot of We for Brave New World, although Huxley always denied it. Ayn Rand's Anthem is uncannily similar to We, as is Eliezer Yudkowsky's online novel Three Worlds Collide, which also touches on the question "is happiness more important than freedom?". Last but not least, We heavily influenced Equilibrium in all its campy glory, so much that it could very well be considered an over-the-top We: The Movie.Zamyatin himself was, in turn, influenced primarily by H. G. Wells, whose works he had previously edited in Russian.Provides examples of:
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