We

Zamiatin, Yevgeny (variously translated and transliterated). We. Written ca. 1920. Available in various trans., including Mirra Ginsburg, trans. New York: Bantam, 1972.

Shows a world in which the "Taylor system" of "scientific" industrial management has been applied to all aspects of life. Along with E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and A. Huxley's Brave New World (all cited under Fiction), one of the central dystopias of the first half of the 20th c. See under Background the entry for F. W. Taylor. We is discussed in detail in Clockwork Worlds by G. Beauchamp; also handled by A. Aldridge, and passim in other essays (consult CW index); see Beauchamp and Aldridge entries under Literary Criticism, and the article on We by C. Rhodes, "Machine" by M. Rose, and the entries for D. Richards and A. Shane.[1]]

Filmed as WIR, (West) Germany, 1982. Storyline given on IMDb, "Based on novel by Jewgenij Samjatin. 'A vision of a united totalitarian state, a world of quadratic harmony and blue-grey conformity'".[2] See also THE GLASS FORTRESS.

See entry for Aleksei Gastev.

Discussed and put into its historical and literary context by I. F. Clarke in ch. 5 "From the Somme and Verdun to Hiroshima and Nagasaki" in his Voices Prophesying War, particularly p. 151.

We and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World put into brief dialog with Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower on the motif of walls and in the context of the wall in We as "how humans 'isolate our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals' (91)" — and both earlier works represent "a critique of Fordist capitalism and imperialism," in Hee-jung Serenity Joo, “Old and New Slavery, Old and New Racisms: Strategies of Science Fiction in Octavia Butler’s ‘’Parables’’ Series, ‘’Extrapolation’’ 52.3 (2011): 282.

Note Virginia L. Conn's "Review of Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East," edited by Anindita Banerjee and Sonja Fritzsche (Oxford, UK and other cities: Peter Lang Publishing), 2018).[3] Conn describes the first chapter as reading We "as a radical Afrofuturist text — an unconventional reading that is meticulously researched, elegantly argued, and works specifically because of its unique perspective" (SFRA Review 50.1 [Winter 2020]).[4][5])

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In a Facebook post of 31 May 2023, John Clute notes that We was preceded by the 1918 Meccania by Owen Gregory.

RDE, Initial compiler, updated 6July20, 20Dec20, 22Oct21, 16Mar23