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by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin is orbiting in a literary space all his own with this one. It is a work without real ancestry, and its descendants have rarely matched its visionary daring. The term “science fiction” was not yet invented when Zamyatin composed this prescient text. It is nevertheless extremely sciencefictional. It has whole sets of sci-fi themes and conceits that were entirely fresh when Zamyatin created them: hermetically sealed cities, synthetic food, unisex suits, Metropolis-like crowds of drones marching through cyclopean apartment blocks, whizzing, roaring trips in giant spaceships, mind control through brain surgery. . . . They’re clichés now, of course: but they were only reduced to clichés through decades of effort by lesser artists.