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“My dear—you are a mathematician. More—you are a philosopher, a mathematical philosopher. Well, then: name me the final number.��

“What do you mean? I . . . I don’t understand: what final number?��

“Well, the final, the ultimate, the largest.��

“But that’s preposterous! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number?��

“Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.��

Many centuries from now, after the Two Hundred Years�� War, OneState rules the world from a city behind the Green Wall that separates the city from the natural world. OneState is made almost entirely of glass to keep its citizens—simply called “numbers”—under constant observation by the Guardians, the enforcers in this totalitarian regime controlled by the Benefactor.

D-503 lives in OneState, and happily so. He’s the lead builder of a spaceship called The Integral, which is preparing to take word of their perfect society to the stars. He’s writing a journal that will be delivered to whomever they find, describing the wondrous order of their society, where every minute of every day is carefully planned by OneState (the Table of Hours), and all of his needs—shelter, food, sex—are controlled and provided by OneState. And then one day D-503 meets I-330, a woman with some pretty bizarre ideas about individual freedom, and it upsets the balance of D-503’s ordered life ��.

It’s impossible to read We without considering its broader place in literature. The author had translated works by H.G. Wells into Russian prior to writing this novel, and Wells�� science fiction influence is obvious. More importantly, We influenced numerous authors who followed, including George Orwell, who was inspired by We to write 1984. And when I say “inspired,�� I mean that there are some substantial similarities between the plots of the two novels. But despite hitting some of the same beats, they are very different novels. D-503 is a true believer in OneState at the start, upbeat and enthusiastic, while Winston Smith is deeply cynical and knows he’s living in a oppressive regime. We is often poetic, with D-503 regularly talking about wanting to rip the square root of -1 out of himself. 1984 is more didactic, a treatise against fascism and an exploration of the power of language to change individuals�� thoughts and society as a whole.

But even judged simply on its own merits, We is a very interesting read. It was written by a Russian citizen just a few years after the 1919 Revolution. The society portrayed seems the logical conclusion of the Russian attempt to apply F.W. Taylor’s ideas about industrial efficiency to people. The fact that the result is a dystopian police state, with individual freedom sacrificed in pursuit of some type of mathematical perfection, is one reason why the novel was first published in the US in 1924, and was not published in Russia until 1988. The other reason is probably that the novel’s thesis is that no society will ever eliminate all dissent, that there will never be a “final revolution,�� a message those who had just overthrown the czars had no interest in hearing. Recommended.