Spring Break Reading #1

Spring Break Reading, as selected and arranged by Sherri:

1. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
2. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
3. Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
4. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

We is a classic dystopian novel, written by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin but published first in English in 1924.  It tells the story of the 26th-century engineer D-503, a Number who has designed the INTEGRAL, the Earth’s first spaceship whose mission is to bring a message to all life in the galaxy.

If they [that is, those “in the primitive state known as freedom”] will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically infallible happiness, we shall be obliged to force them to be happy.

The people of D-503’s society, OneState, venerate mathematics and the purity of numbers, logic, and reason.  Ever since humanity began to live behind the Green Wall, safely separated from the chaos of nature, life has been organized and blissfully nonfree.  However, when D-503 meets the woman I-330 by chance, he begins to fall in love and, even worse, develop a soul.

Torn between following the dictates of his society and his new feelings, D-503 writes in his journal about first his confusion and conflict, and later about the conspiracy designed to destroy the OneState itself, a conspiracy that has his INTEGRAL ship at its heart.  This book challenges D-503 to think of himself as an individual rather than one part of a regulated whole, and it also reveals to him the mystery of beautiful disorder.  Ultimately, human imagination itself is threatened by the OneState.  This isn’t a dystopia for nothing.