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This is the first book the Soviet censors banned. Zamyatin wrote it in 1920 and 1921, submitted it, and was refused. It reached print in English in New York in 1924, which means the novel existed in translation for years before it existed in its own language, and it was not published in Russian inside Russia until 1988. Sixty seven years between a book being written and its own country being allowed to read it.

The One State is a city of glass under a dome, walled off from whatever is left outside by the Green Wall. Nobody has a name. People are numbers, they wear the same uniform, they eat petroleum food, they rise and chew and work and sleep on the same minute as everybody else because the Table of Hours says so. Sex is legal and scheduled, applied for with a coupon, and the blinds come down for exactly that hour. The Benefactor is elected every year, unanimously, in public, and the unanimity is the point of the ceremony.

D-503 builds the ship. He is the chief engineer of the Integral, which is being sent out to carry the arithmetic of the One State to whatever it finds, and he starts a diary so the ship will have something to take with it. Forty Records. He is a mathematician and he begins the way a mathematician begins, certain that freedom and crime are the same quantity and that he can prove it. Then a woman with sharp teeth and a habit of laughing at him takes him through a door in the Wall, and the prose starts coming apart in his hands. He heads each Record with a line of keywords, and five times he cannot manage even that. One of them reads No, I Can't. Another reads I Don't Know What Title. Those are not printing errors and they have not been tidied up here.

What the State finally works out is that the trouble is anatomical. Imagination is a growth, it has been located, and it can be burned out of a man with X rays in twenty minutes. The last quarter of the book is a city queuing up for the Operation, and the question it leaves sitting on the table is whether a person who consents to that is still the person who walked in.

Orwell reviewed it in 1946, said Huxley's Brave New World was partly derived from it, and published 1984 three years later. Read the two together and the debt is not subtle. Zamyatin got none of it. He was an old Bolshevik who had been arrested by the Tsar's police and then by the Soviets, a naval engineer who built icebreakers on the Tyne, and he wrote to Stalin in 1931 asking to be allowed out. He was, and he died broke in Paris in 1937.

This is the Civil Savage Society edition of Gregory Zilboorg's translation of 1924, the first appearance of the novel in any language, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 196 pages. All forty Records, each opening its own page under its numeral and its synopsis, the quoted State documents and bulletins, the narrator's own footnotes, and his dashes, which are how the man thinks and are not smoothed out. Dropped: the 1924 translator's essay and the public domain apparatus.

Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.

Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.

Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.