ritten in 1920 by an ex-Bolshevik disillusioned with the Stalinist
regime in Russia, We is the story of D-503. D is a productive citizen of
the One State, which has achieved perfection through precision. The One
State is a city of glass walled off from the chaos and suffering of the
natural world. All activity in the One State is governed by timetable. D-503
rises, goes to work, eats (chewing exactly 50 times per bite) and has sex in
accordance with the Table of Hours.
D-503 is also the builder of the One State's crowning achievement: the
Integral, a huge rocketship that will bring the blessings of the One
State to the rest of the cosmos. As the launch of this triumphant mission
approaches, D's mathematically ordained happiness dissolves. A new
variable in the form of the alluring woman I-330 disrupts his equation. She tempts
D with forbidden vices, including unscheduled sex (as well as unscheduled
celibacy) and subversive ideas. He falls under her unbreakable spell and
undergoes a desperate, impossible struggle to reconcile the logic of duty
with the longings of his heart.
Written as a series of diary entries by D, We begins with
bland proclamations ("Only the rational and useful is beautiful: machines,
boots, formulas...") but soon turns into the agitated ruminations of a mind
headed for a psychotic breakdown. For the first time in his life, D
experiences dreams. Then a mysterious doctor informs him that he has developed a
soul, and the condition is incurable.
Even revolution is repressive
Political novels often suffer from rapid obsolescence. That might at
first seem to be the case with We, with the Soviet Union gone and
communism generally on the wane worldwide. But We, translated here by
Mirra Ginsburg, is more than a satire of the totalitarian state author Yevgeny Zamyatin saw
emerging under Stalin. As the Yugoslavia-born science fiction critic Darko
Suvin has noted, We argues that every revolution eventually congeals
into a repressive orthodoxy.
Zamyatin makes it clear that the One State's antecedents include
Christianity and industrial capitalism, which both emerged in a spirit of
liberation and at one time or another have succumbed to brutal excesses. The
movement fighting to topple the One State is not immune to the same
fate. D-503's journey from good citizen to insurrectionist does not
make him free. He merely exchanges one form of slavery for another.
Despite the sterile uniformity of the One State, the characters in We
are human, and the bitter satire turns poignant as D-503 begins to see
the hidden suffering all around him. Zamyatin's vision of the future doesn't
resonate with the real world the way George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-four did, but its psychological intensity and almost surrealistic
imagery make We a powerful and disturbing novel.
We made Zamyatin a literary outcast in Russia. The guardians of
ideological purity censored and widely denounced him. He emigrated to
Paris in 1931, but was not accepted by his fellow Russian exiles because he
wasn't right-wing enough. Perhaps that is a sad vindication of his work.
ditor David G. Hartwell continues his annual anthology series with Year's Best
SF 4, this year choosing 20 of 1998's best science fiction stories. In
his brief introduction, Hartwell makes a couple of important points
regarding his selections. First, he writes that it's impossible to include
all of the best fiction from last year. Therefore, this volume should be
regarded as only a sampling of the best. And he writes that 1998 was an unusually
good year for short SF overall, but especially the novella length.
Secondly, Hartwell says that he only includes stories that are undeniably
science fiction.
The 20 stories he selects this year include Alexander Jablokov's "Market
Report," Gregory Benford's "A Dance to Strange Musics," Norman Spinrad's
"The Year of the Mouse," Mary Soon Lee's "The Day Before They Came," Rob
Chilson's "This Side of Independence," Stephen Baxter's "The Twelfth Album,"
Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life," Robert Reed's "Whiptail," Mary
Rosenblum's "The Eye of God," Michael F. Flynn's "Rules of Engagement,"
Michael Swanwick's "Radiant Doors," Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Unraveling the
Thread," Dominic Green's "That Thing Over There," Mark S. Geston's "The
Allies," Ron Goulart's "My Pal Clunky," David Brin's "Life in the Extreme,"
Michael Skeet's "Near Enough to Home," David Langford's "A Game of
Consequences," Nancy Kress' "State of Nature," and Bruce Sterling's "Maneki
Neko."
While Hartwell's selections are indeed unequivocally science fiction,
they span the entire SF spectrum, with a couple of alternate
histories (Baxter's "The Twelfth Album" and Skeet's "Near Enough to Home"),
two stories that explore gender issues (Reed's "Whiptail" and Kress'
"State of Nature"), several pieces that deal with alien contact, a pair of
satires (Spinrad's "The Year of the Mouse" and Goulart's "My Pal Clunky"),
and a few hard science fiction stories (including Benford's "A Dance to
Strange Musics" and Chiang's "The Story of Your Life").
A very good year indeed
Of Hartwell's 20 selections for Year's Best SF 4, only one, Ted
Chiang's "The Story of Your Life," was also selected by Gardner Dozois
for his competing "year's best" series, although a number of authors were selected by
both. For readers, this is a wonderful thing, because the two books
complement each other nicely rather than partially overlapping, as they have
in the past. Hartwell is one of the SF's best and most knowledgeable editors (as is
Dozois), and the result is a fine group of stories.
Chiang's piece, a novella in which a linguist's efforts to translate an
alien language are interlaced with a overview of her relationship with her
daughter, is probably the year's best story, as well as being the longest
one in the book. Close behind, however, is one of the shortest, Kress'
"State of Nature," in which a lesbian travels to a remote protected
community to try to convince her former lover to join the fight for legal
equality. Swanwick's brilliant "Radiant Doors" is an interesting reversal
of the time travel story, in which refugees flee to the present from a
dystopian future. And Benford's "A Dance to Strange Musics" is a fascinating
"novel" compressed into 32 pages about the exploration of a planet in the
Alpha Centauri system.
Skeet's "Close Enough to Home" is an excellent Civil
War story, set in an alternate history in which Canada dominates North
America. Some of the other particularly strong stories include Rosenblum's
"The Eye of God," Reed's "Whiptail," Geston's "The Allies," Jablokov's
"Market Report," Dunyach's "Unraveling the Thread," and Green's "That Thing
Over There."
Year's Best SF 4 is a fine chronicle of what turned out to be a very good year for short
science fiction. While intentionally not as diverse as the Dozois anthology,
Hartwell's book does convey the variety of contemporary SF, in addition to
showcasing some excellent writing.
