We

We is written in the form of notes: thirty records (forty in the standard version) addressed to future readers by D-503, a mathematician and the designer of the spaceship Integral, describing life in the twenty-sixth-century One State. In this realm, enclosed by glass walls and ruled by the Benefactor, citizens have no names, only numbers; every activity is precisely ordered by the Table of Hours, with rising, meals, walks, and sleep completed at the same second; emotion, imagination, and poetry are regarded as an illness requiring treatment, and the individual exists only as a member of the whole. D-503 is at first a model adherent of this order, but he changes after meeting the female number I-330. She leads him through the world beyond the Green Wall and makes him feel for the first time the existence of a "soul" and the terrifying lure of freedom. As he writes, justifying himself all the while, the tone of the diary slides from cool engineering report toward contradiction, trembling, and loss of control. The novel wraps a great debate about freedom and happiness, reason and human nature, the individual and the collective in the language of numbers, functions, and geometry, and its ending is cold and disturbing. Written in 1920 and first published in England in 1924, the book was long banned in the Soviet Union and only officially published there in 1988. It is regarded as the founding work of dystopian literature and, together with Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, is known as one of the "three great dystopias"; its transparent glass dwellings, numbered names, and unified schedules deeply influenced later science fiction and political allegory.