Slowed only by language barriers, science fiction has flourished throughout the world, telling dazzling stories of the future, and the world we live in. But as the world grows ever more connected, something extraordinary has begun to happen: diverse strands of the science fiction literary tradition have begun to seek one another out. Magazines and major publishers are […]
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Overview
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
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781680572070 |
---|---|
Publisher: | WordFire Press |
Publication date: | 02/03/2023 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 268 |
Sales rank: | 974,517 |
File size: | 758 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
First Entry
T0PICS:A Proclamation
The Wisest of Lines
A Poem
I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One State Gazette:
The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy. But before resorting to arms, we shall try the power of words.
In the name of the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One State:
Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes, manifestoes, Poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur of the One
State.
This will be the first cargo to be carried by the In
tegral.
Long live the One State, long live the numbers,
long live the Benefactor!
I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent-an asymptote a straight line. For the line of the One State is thestraight line. The great, divine, exact, wise straight linethe wisest of all lines.
1, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of the mathematicians of the One State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the music of assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, Or, to be more exact, what we think (precisely so-we, and let this We be the title of MY record) . But since this record will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically Perfect life of the One State, will it not be, of itself, and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? it will. I believe, I know it
I write this, and my cheeks are burning- This must be similar to what a woman feels when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is 1, and at the same time, not 1. And for many long months it will be necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own blood, then tear it painfully from myself and lay it at the feet of the One State.
But I am ready, like every one, or almost every one, of us. I am ready.
Second Entry
TOPICS:Ballet
Square Harmony
X
Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings yellow honey pollen of some unknown flowers. The sweet pollen dries your lips, and every minute you pass your tongue over them. The Ups of all the women you see must be sweet (of the men, too, of course). This interferes to some extent with the flow of logical thought.
But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling piles of vapor!) I Iove I am certain I can safely say, we love-only such a sterile, immaculate sky. On days like this the whole world is cast of the same impregnable, eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see the bluest depth of things, their hitherto unknown, astonishing equations-you see them even in the most familiar everyday objects.
Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral is being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator spheres rotating with dosed eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance beam proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and down in time to unheard music. Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight.
And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in absolute, esthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time immemorial, and we, in our present life, are only consciously....
I will have to finish later: the annunciator clicked. I looked up: 0-90, of course. In half a minute she'll be here, for our daily walk.
Dear O! It always seems to me that she looks exactly like her name: about ten centimeters shorter than the Maternal Norm, and therefore carved in the round, all of her, with that pink O, her mouth, open to meet every word I say. And also, that round, plump fold on her wrist, like a baby's.
When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still humming at full swing within me, and I began, by sheer force of inertia, to speak to her about the formula I had just established, which encompassed everything dance, machines, and all of us.
"Marvelous, isn't it?" I asked.
"Yes, marvelous." O-90 smiled rosily at me. "It's spring."
Well, wouldn't you know: spring ... She talks ,about spring. Women ... I fell silent.
Downstairs, the avenue was full. In such weathers the...
Table of Contents
We Introduction: Zamyatin and the RoosterNotes to Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
WERecord 1
Announcement
The Wisest of Lines
An Epic Poem
Record 2
Ballet
Harmony Squared
X
Record 3
Jacket
Wall
The Table
Record 4
Savage with Barometer
Epilepsy
If
Record 5
Square
Rulers of the World
Pleasant and Useful Function
Record 6
Accident
Damned "Clear"
24 Hours
Record 7
An Eyelash
Taylor
Henbane and Lily of the Valley
Record 8
The Irrational Root
R-13
Triangle
Record 9
Liturgy
Iambs and Trochees
Cast-Iron Hand
Record 10
Letter
Membrane
Hairy Me
Record 11
No, I Can't...
Skip the Contents
Record 12
Limitation of Infinity
Angel
Reflections on Poetry
Record 13
Fog
Familiar "You"
An Absolutely Inane Occurrence
Record 14
"Mine"
Forbidden
Cold Floor
Record 15
Bell
Mirror-like Sea
My Fate to Burn Forever
Record 16
Yellow
Two-Dimensional Shadow
Incurable Soul
Record 17
Through Glass
I Died
Hallways
Record 18
Logical Labyrinth
Wounds and Plaster
Never Again
Record 19
Third-Order Infinitesimal
A Sullen Glare
Over the Parapet
Record 20
Discharge
Idea Material
Zero Cliff
Record 21
An Author's Duty
Swollen Ice
The Most Difficult Love
Record 22
Frozen Waves
Everything Tends to Perfection
I Am a Microbe
Record 23
Flowers
Dissolution of a Crystal
If Only
Record 24
Limit of Function
Easter
Cross It All Out
Record 25
Descent from Heaven
History's Greatest Catastrophe
End of the Known
Record 26
The World Exists
A Rash
41 Centigrade
Record 27
No Contents - Can't
Record 28
Both Women
Entropy and Energy
Opaque Part of the Body
Record 29
Threads on the Face
Shoots
Unnatural Compression
Record 30
The Final Number
Galileo's Mistake
Wouldn't It Be Better?
Record 31
The Great Operation
I Have Forgiven Everything
A Train Wreck
Record 32
I Do Not Believe
Tractors
The Human Chip
Record 33
(No Time for Contents, Last Note)
Record 34
Those on Leave
A Sunny Night
Radio-Valkyrie
Record 35
In a Hoop
Carrot
Murder
Record 36
Blank Pages
The Christian God
About My Mother
Record 37
Infusorian
Doomsday
Her Room
Record 38
(I Don't Know What Goes Here, Maybe Just: A Cigarette Butt)
Record 39
The End
Record 40
Facts
The Bell
I Am Certain
Translator's Notes
What People are Saying About This
"One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century." -Irving Howe