We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

the cruel descent of the Bolshevik rebellion into frozen dogma and totalitarian stasis.

The term “science fiction” was not yet invented when Zamyatin composed this prescient text. It is nevertheless extremely sciencefictional.

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.”

The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

It was also the year that the word robot came into being (originating in the Russian and Czech word rabotat’, which means “to work”).

included god-building, tectology,

The proletarian poet Alexei Gastev, described by Nikolai Aseev as the “Ovid of engineers, miners and metalworkers,” was the most active advocate of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about men and machines.

A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat’.

wasn’t until 1988 that the manuscript was published in the Soviet Union.

in 1922, Max Eastman, defender of the revolution in Russia, said, “I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and Communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life.”

SUBJUGATING THEM TO THE BENEFICIAL YOKE OF REASON.

MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS,

And it will feed for many months on my sap, my blood, and then, in anguish, it will be ripped from my self and placed at the foot of the One State.

mathematical equality—

And then I thought to myself: why? Is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? The answer: because it is non-free movement, because the whole profound point of this dance lies precisely in its absolute, aesthetic subordination, its perfect non-freedom.

the instinct for non-freedom, from the earliest of times, is inherently characteristic of humankind, and we, in our very contemporary life, are simply more conscious . . .

faces unclouded by the folly of thought

the quadratic harmony of the gray-blue ranks.

jumbled crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, paint, birds . . . And

do you know, they say that it was actually like that—that it’s actually possible. I found that so improbable, so ludicrous, that I couldn’t contain myself and laughed out loud.

“You see, even in our thoughts. No one is ever ‘one,’ but always ‘one of.’ We are so identical . . .”

The Personal Hour was over.

The effect of that woman on me was as unpleasant as a displaced irrational number that has accidentally crept into an equation.

She came over only yesterday and knows as well as I do that our next Sex Day is the day after tomorrow. This was simply that same “pre-ignition of thought” as happens (sometimes harmfully) when a spark is issued prematurely in an engine.

It is clear that the whole of human history, as far as we know, is the story of transition from a nomadic mode of life toward an increasingly settled one.

I cannot picture a city without the dressing of the Green Wall, I cannot picture a life not expressed in the numerical overlay of the Table.

I’ve come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganized savage state.

But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power—primitive though it was—have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks,

without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, lights burned in the streets all night long,...

The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn’t forbid the half-killing of millions.

And then, isn’t it absurd that the government (it dared call itself a government!) could fail to impose any control on sexual lives? It was whoever, whenever, and however much you wanted . . . Absolutely unscientifically, like wild animals. And, like wild animals, obliviously giving birth to children. Isn’t it funny to know crop breeding, poultry breeding, fish breeding (we have specific information that they knew how to do these things), and not to be able to get to the top rung of that logical ladder: child breeding? Not to pursue those ideas all the way to our Maternal and Paternal Norms?

Fortunately, it rarely happens. Fortunately, these are only minor incidentals: they are easily repaired, without having to stop the perpetual, great progress of the whole machine. And to expel the offending cog, we have the skillful, severe hand of the Benefactor and we have the experienced eye of the Guardians . . .

. . By simply turning this handle, any of you could produce up to three sonatas an hour. What a struggle this was for our ancestors. They could create only if they drove themselves to fits of ‘inspiration,’

a strange form of epilepsy.

is likely that I was astonished by her unexpected appearance on the stage.

Evrthibg is ordered except for desire

Once home, I hurried to the building office, handed my pink ticket to the monitor, and received permission for blind-lowering. This permission is only given to us on Sex Days. Otherwise, we live in full view, perpetually awash with light, in among our transparent walls, woven from the sparkling air. We have nothing to hide from one another.

It’s possible that it was exactly those strange nontransparent habitations of the Ancients that gave rise to that sorry cellular mentality of theirs. “My (sic!) house is my castle”— they really should have thought that through!

"no homeoner will be a communist"

At 22:00, I lowered the blinds and at that same minute O walked in, a little out of breath. She offered me her pink little mouth and her pink ticket. I

tore the pink ticket but couldn’t tear myself away from the pink mouth until the very last moment at 22:15.

Desire cant be controlled or regulated

She listened so charming-pinkly, and suddenly from those blue eyes: a tear, another, and a third, right onto the open page (page 7). The ink ran. So now I’ll have to copy it out again.

Flow my tears the policeman said

“Love and hunger are the masters of the world.” Ergo, to take control of the world, man must take control of the masters of the world.

Hunger is conquered but can or should love be conquered?

True, only 0.2 percent of the population of the earthly sphere survived. But in exchange for all that—the cleansing of thousand-year-old filth— how glistening the face of the earth has become! In exchange for all that, this zero-point-two percent has tasted bliss in the ramparts of the One State.

Isn’t it clear that bliss and envy—they are the numerator and the denominator of the fraction known as happiness. And what would be the point of those countless sacrifices in the Two-Hundred-Year War if, in our life, there still remained good reason for enviousness? But it did remain, because noses were still “button” noses and “classical” noses (our prior conversation on the walk), and because some achieved the love of many but many achieved the love of none.

natural that having subjugated Hunger (algebraically = to the sum of material goods), the One State began an offensive against the other master of the world—against Love. Finally, even this natural force was also conquered, i.e., organized and mathematicized, and around three hundred years ago, our historical Lex Sexual...

blood

Bogdonov

Table of Sex Days for you.

From this you will see how the great strength of logic purifies everything, no matter what it touches.

I wanted to cross out that last part because it goes beyond the bounds of my preselected keywords for this record.

Humbert humbert and his recordings in Lolita

we have channeled all the forces of nature—there cannot be any future catastrophes.

It is simply that I am afraid that some kind of X exists in you, unknown readers of mine.

A variable