Add some predictions that will make contemporary readers double take (electric toothbrushes, the large-scale application of hydroelectricity and robotic teachers that children give nicknames to and treat cruelly all make an appearance) and it’s a book that retains its cleverness, freshness and relevance to this day. The ideas are enormously high concept and the storytelling – short chapters told in first person through an unreliable narrator – are exactly what we’d expect from a science-fiction novel today. It’s almost impossible to believe We is nearly a century old. Nearly seven decades after it was written, and half a century after the author’s death (whilst in exile in Paris), Zamyatin’s satire on the ugliness of Communist socialism was allowed to find an audience amongst those for whom the book had originally been written. We, now available from The Folio Society in slipcase featuring a lenticular optical illusion of human faces, was written in 1921 but banned from Zamyatin’s native Russia until 1988, once Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost thawed the Cold War and helped to bring down the Iron Curtain. It’s not necessarily a mark of fine achievement or controversy for an author to have their book banned within the Soviet Union – that most brutally oppressive and censorious of empires – but Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian science-fiction story We happened to be the first, and that lends it historical significance on top of its literary merits.

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