Early Dystopian Sci-Fi

There is a something very strange about experiencing a work of art, whether a book, a film, or a painting, and feeling that you know it already. It comes from the experiences you have had of its influence, echoing across later artworks. I felt this recently watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it struck me again reading this week’s book: a science fiction classic lent to me by a generous colleague of mine.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921)

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novella, We, is well-known by virtue of its influence on one of the greatest dystopian novels ever written: George Orwell’s 1984. Its depiction of a totalitarian communist state that oppressed its citizens under the guise of providing universal peace and happiness is one that no longer feels revolutionary to us, thanks to many texts that followed, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Ayn Rand’s Anthem, to name but a few of these. These ideas reflect a nightmarish vision of the dark side of Russian communism – something I found to be an interesting foil to my recent reading, where viewpoints were less radical in voicing dissent.

Something that surprised me, however, was the news from my colleague that Zamyatin was influenced by his time living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne – where I have lived for the past year. He was sent there to supervise the construction of ice-breaking ships, and was apparently inspired by this, leading him to assign his characters with names similar to those given to the ships – D-530, I-330. I found a really good article that explores Zamyatin’s relationship with the city and its possible influence on his work, including We. Essentially, his experience of England was a mix of disgust and dislike towards what he saw as its uniform buildings that showed no imagination. Similarly, the city in We is described as lacking distinctive features, made of strong glass, preventing privacy except with permission for copulating.

Moving away from the interesting biography behind the text, I enjoyed Zamyatin’s clever use of imagery and description to demonstrate the narrator D-530’s evolving understanding and exposure to imagination. His early suspicion of human tendencies towards engaging with dreams and feelings slowly eroded as he is exposed to alternative modes of living and a world beyond his own regulated existence. Some of the later chapters blossom with vivid metaphors, such as:

And there are planets following me: flame-spurting planets, densely populated with fiery singing flowers; and mute, blue planets, where rational rocks are united into organised societies—they are planets like our Earth that have reached the summit of absolute, one-hundred-percent happiness… [161]

I see the transparent, living cranes bending their swanlike necks, stretching out their beaks, thoughtfully and tenderly feeding the Integral with scary explosive food for its engine. [164-5]

It was extremely effective when this is stripped away to show the reader exactly the impact of losing one’s imagination in the final chapter, as though bleaching a previously colourful text back to blank, lifeless prose. It reminded me favourably of Daniel Keyes’s use of a similar narrative device in Flowers for Algernon, where the narrator’s intelligence is demonstrated through his vocabulary and the complexity of his sentence structures.

In other places, the book was less sophisticated, though understandably so, as it aimed to situate the reader in what would have been a confusing new genre. For example, D-530 frequently refers to and makes comparisons with the ancient past where humans lived in a normal society, or to a similar imagined society on a different planet. These comparisons felt ineffective to me, as it had the effect of breaking the fourth wall and spoiling the suspension of disbelief. Immediately the fiction dissipates and the author’s hand is visible in stark relief. In a few spots, this allows Zamyatin to create fascinating images, such as below, but usually it felt forced within the narrative:

About five centuries ago, when work in the Operation Room had only just begun, there were fools who compared the Operation Room with the ancient Inquisition, but you see, that was just absurd. It was like equating a surgeon doing a tracheotomy to a highway robber: they both might have the same knife in their hands and they are both performing the same action (slitting the throat of a living person)—and yet one is a benefactor and the other, a criminal, one is a + sign and the other is a – sign… [72]

Finally, a point that really resonated with me was one made early in the book: that art can be made to serve the state. The novel itself was banned, which is easy to understand, as it is easily read as a critique of state control. Many Soviet writers struggled against the strict censorship and censure of their work, while others, such as my beloved Vladimir Mayakovsky were allowed to flourish at the coast of writing only what perpetuated state ideals. Zamyatin captures this maxim of the times in a society where each citizen is required to create art to promote their model is civilisation – which is to be sent to other planets, to spread the empire, so to speak. This is captured in a pithy one-liner that entirely removes imagination and impulse from art:

Poetry is a state service; poetry is purpose. [60]

Zamyatin’s We, while having lost much of its initial force in the last century after its best ideas were reused and developed in later texts, is certainly worth reading to understand the earliest roots of dystopian science fiction, and to see how the core ideals have remained the same. We are shown that people in the West value individualism over communal happiness and fear the means that a powerful nanny state could use to oppress their freedoms. I found Zamyatin’s exploration of these ideas to be done in a sensitive, linguistically-elegant way, even though it was not as hard-hitting as it may have been to his contemporaries.

Similar books: Ayn Rand, Anthem; George Orwell, 1984; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon; Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains.