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The One State is the perfect society, ruled over by the enlightened Benefactor. It is a city made almost entirely of glass, where surveillance is universal and life runs according to algorithmic rules to ensure perfect happiness. And D-503, the Builder, is the ideal citizen, at least until he meets I-330, who opens his eyes to new ideas of love, sex and freedom.
A foundational work of dystopian fiction, inspiration for both Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World, WE is a book of radical imaginings - of control and rebellion, surveillance and power, machine intelligence and human inventiveness, sexuality and desire. In this brilliant new translation, it is both a warning and a hope for a better world.
About the author
Yevgeny Zamyatin was a naval engineer and author. He wrote short stories, plays and essays. His masterpiece, We, was written in 1920-21 and was banned in Russia on the grounds of being ideologically undesirable. It was quickly translated and published in many languages around the world, finally being publishing in Russia in 1988.Bela Shayevich is a Soviet-American writer, translator and illustrator. She translated Nobel Prize Winner Svetlana Alexievich's Second-hand Time.Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. In addition to the classic The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize and Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2008. In 2017, The Handmaid's Tale was adapted for an Emmy-nominated TV series and Alias Grace was adapted into a Netflix Original.Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children's books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA's Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
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Summary
A brilliant new translation of the dystopian classic that influenced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, introduced by Margaret Atwood
Additional text
It is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again
Report
The best single work of science fiction yet written URSULA K. LE GUIN
