During a time of growing concern about democratic decline and techno-authoritarianism in other countries abroad, dystopian fiction has again become one of the more popular genres in the United States. By far the most well-known book in this genre is George Orwell's seminal 1984 – and yet, despite that, Orwell himself drew from earlier sources while writing his dreary story about life in Oceania.
Enter Yevgeny Zamyatin and his book We, hailed by many later readers as one of the chief progenitors of the dystopian fiction genre. Written in revolutionary Russia immediately prior to the establishment of the Soviet Union, Zamyatin's We ultimately became the first book to be banned by the...