We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We

Pretty much the grandfather of the classic, totalitarian dystopias. 1984, Brave New World, Kallocain - this novel helped spawn them all. Often, I'll find that I don't enjoy a book that's become this huge influence, preferring the distilled version found in later works. In this case, however, it turns out that the original charmed me in ways that the later novel (no matter how much I did enjoy them) simply couldn't.

Orwell's best work is very spare and stripped down, for example, but Zamyatin's writing in We is almost romantic. His main character, D-503, tell the whole story as a sort of love poem. At first, he is driven by love of state, love of belonging, love of work. As he progresses, he falls not only for mysterious and rebellious I-330, he also freely expresses his feelings for the voluptuous O-90 and their friend/her other lover R-13. His journal style matches this outpouring of emotion. Just riding in an air car comes out as:

Five minutes later, we were already in the areo. The blue majolica of the Maytime sky; the light sun in its own golden aero buzzing after us, neither falling behind nor overtaking us. And ahead of us - a cloud, white as a cataract, preposterous and puffed out like the cheeks of an ancient cupid, and somehow disturbing. Our front window is up. Wind, drying the lips. Involuntarily, you lick them all the time, and all the time you think of lips.

"And all the time you think of lips." I didn't find anything that simply beautiful in 1984. And that feeling remains until the end, even though the narrator's soul is lost, the people themselves may be rescued. It's no accident that this is shown by the flight of birds, formerly banned from the city. All of We, from the space craft to the love stories, is a longing toward flight.

Kallocain by Karin Boye

Kallocain

First of all, I want to thank Peter from Dystopiate for sending me a copy of this one. Coming home to a package from Sweden on my porch was very cool. Also, I don't like to read books online, but if you do, you can find the complete text right here. It's well worth reading in any format, honestly.

Kallocain pretty well sums up my biggest dystopian nightmare: not only are you being watched and listened to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from bed to bath to work and back again (yeah, no wonder the population is dropping with everyone knowing they're being watched and judged in the sack), but now the government can even access your secret thoughts!

It's amazing to me, sometimes (the rest of the time it's just depressing) how easy it is to convince so many people to assist in their own degradation or enslavement. Plenty of stick, a little carrot, a healthy dose of "it's for your own good," a double helping of "everyone does it, don't rock the boat" and you wind up with poor Leo Kall. Working his ass off, between mandatory service nights and pep rallies, to give the government new and exciting ways to control him and his loved ones.

Even in our society, if they (that nebulous they) could hear your hidden thoughts, of course none of us would be found innocent. As Leo's coworker and eventual breaking point says, "no one over 40 years old has a clean conscience." What do you think you'd confess? Weird sex fantasies, violent urges, racist leanings? Falling in love with the wrong person or people? Hating your parents? Kicking puppies, watching American Idol, voting for Bush? God save us.

final thought: This novel should be better known, right alongside Brave New World and 1984.

If you'd like a few words about Kallocain from a Swedish philosopher, check here.

Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich (Владимир Войнович)

Moscow 2042

I'm not a student of either Russian politics or literature,, so I'm sure plenty of the deeper meaning (and possibly the jokes) passed me by on this one. That being said, I'm enough a child of the Cold War - and Voinovich is enough of a writer - that I didn't feel lost or let down. My sister asked what I was reading. I showed it to her and said, "It's funny as hell. It's a lot funnier than it looks from the cover." She, of course, replied, "It would have to be."

Moscow 2042 came out in 1986, written just a few years before perestroika and glasnost and the reforms that swept through the USSR. If you were around back then, you know the images that the American public received of life under communism - bread lines, ridiculous bureaucracy, censorship, drab clothing, heavy vodka drinking, plenty of propaganda at work. Interestingly, that's nearly exactly how Voinovich portrays his dystopian version of communism at work. Now, I have no real idea how day to day life in Moscow went in the early 80s, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't quite as glum as we were led to believe. Reading this one boosted that feeling - if it was already that bad, the dystopian, possible future would have been a hell of a lot worse.

I wondered a few things while I read this one. Who is he satirizing with his working class writer hero, ready to ride into Moscow on a white horse and be declared Tsar? How much of what he was satirizing was already happening and how much was extrapolation? And what is up with so many writers giving their late-middle-age alter egos young, willing, sexually gifted women to fuck? I mean, sure, I get it. But really? Were there honestly that many Russian spy babes out to rub their naughty bits up on aging writers? I doubt it. Probably helps keep warm, though.

But there were still plenty of tasty little bits to enjoy. The horrors of vegetarian pork. The concept of food and shit and whether one is the other. Long bills on caps to prevent the people from looking at movies projected on the clouds. I do tend to love books that take government control to the absolute extreme. Reading them is like whistling past the graveyard: can't happen to me! Nope, not here!

final thought: For me to get this much enjoyment out of a translated novel satiring something I know so little about is fairly amazing. I have nothing but praise for

Terraplane by Jack Womack

Terraplane

I know I'm not doing myself any favors by reading Womack's work out of order, but he writes well enough that I get along regardless. Once again, as I said when I read Elvissey, Womack is that rare author that manages to twist language until it truly does sound evolved but not overly contrived. "Why aren't we knived?" asks the killer Jake at dinner. Nouns into verbs and back again - once you get the flow, it's worth riding.

And once again Womack delves into race and the American history thereof, into corporate ownership (no stretch to think of the Coke company owning and branding their workers), into what happens when you twist just here and here and then see what comes out of the culture. He's sort of the less-techy-obsessed William Gibson.

As a guy fairly obsessed with personal liberty and keeping as much corporate bullshit out of my life as possible, his future seems mighty damn bleak in a very WalMart sort of way. On the other hand, I'm a white man in the '00s, not a black person dealing with the hate and oppression this country's doled out for a couple hundred years. To Norman and Wanda, the idea of almost-equality goes a long way toward making up for other flaws in the Dryco age.

final thought: It's all about loyalty and what that means in the face of ownership, relationships, love, brotherhood, military comradeship, political ties. Who are you loyal to? Do they deserve it?

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Animal Farm

This is how you do it. There's a reason Animal Farm is a classic of both literature in general and political satire specifically - it's damn near perfect. The allegory is simple enough for a literate child to grasp, even if they have no information about Stalinism or Soviet Communism to base it on, and for those who have studied history it maintains its worth as a fable.

The telling of the story itself can scarcely be criticized. You know what's going to happen. It's obvious from Napoleon's first appearance that he'll soon be as much (or more) of a tyrant as the original farmer. Heck, I'd read it before, back in middle school, but I still felt the rush when the animals drove out their owner and burned the whips, seethed with anger at Squealer's endless propaganda (swallowed whole by the mostly-illiterate and trusting workers), shared Benjamin's rage and horror as Boxer is sold to the knackers to pay for the pigs' carousing.

I believe it was Terry Pratchett who said something like, "There's a reason they're called revolutions - it all just keeps coming around to the beginning again." What I found interesting, though, was that the book really isn't a flat out condemnation of socialism or even communism - it's about a promise broken, power seized, and ideals twisted into a horrible shape. I think that's part of why, even while USSR-style communism fades into history, you can apply the Animal Farm allegory to any number of political situations. It's not strictly tied to the obvious.

final thought: This book scared the crap out of me as a preteen. (I was already fairly paranoid and antigovernment way back then.) These days I find it less frightening, but I think it maintains a current of power found in very little political writing.