Noting my tastes, my friend Stuart recently returned from England and thrust his copy of 'We' into my hand to fill one of the holes in my reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's short novel, written in the immediate aftermath of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, is the grandfather of all 20th-century science fiction dystopias and remains immensely readable almost 83 years after he penned it.
"A dystopia is any society considered to be undesirable, for any of a number of reasons. The term was coined as a converse to a Utopia, and is most usually used to refer to a fictional (often near-future) society where current social trends are taken to nightmarish extremes," the superb Wikipedia informs us.

The ordinary narrator of 'We' is D-503, a contented Number in the perfect OneState, whose citizens live and work their mathematically ordered 26th-century existences under the benevolent rule of the 'Benefactor', watched over by the Guardians.
Nobody has or needs names in OneState, a monumental and proud social collective living in glass and steel buildings protected from the chaos of an inhuman, natural world which lies beyond the Green Wall, constructed in the aftermath of a devastating 200 Years War.
D-503, like Zamyatin himself, is a mathematician and engineer, the builder of "the glass, the electric, the fire-breathing INTEGRAL," a spaceship due for imminent lift-off "to place the beneficial yoke of reason round the necks of the unknown beings who inhabit other planets — still living, it may be, in the primitive state known as freedom."

This tightly written tale — not much more than 200 pages long in Clarence Brown's 1993 translation published in Penguin Twentieth Century Classics (Amazon UK) — is hard to read with a fresh eye when you come to it after digesting the dystopian novels and films it directly inspired or has influenced, from George Orwell's '1984' to Kurt Wimmer's 'Equilibrium' (2002; IMDb, reviewed last July).
While 'We' retains all its relevance when it comes to humanity's pursuit of happiness and as a satirical critique of planning for a perfect society, it is also, as Brown points out in an admirable and witty introduction, very much a work of its time.

"I suddenly recalled," D-503 notes in his 'Record Two', "a picture in the museum: one of the avenues they had back then, after twenty centuries — a stunningly garish, mixed-up crush of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colours, birds . . . And they say it was really like that. It could have been like that. It all struck me as so unlikely, so idiotic, that I couldn't help it, I burst out laughing.
And suddenly there was an echo, laughter, from the right. I turned. Before my eyes were teeth — white, uncommonly white, sharp teeth — and a woman's face that I didn't know.
'I'm sorry,' she said, 'but the way you were looking at everything, it was inspired, as if you were some god out of myth on the seventh day of creation. I think you believe you created me, too — you and nobody else. I'm very flattered.'
All this with a straight face."

D-503 gets confused from this very first encounter with I-330. D-503 is destined to become totally infatuated with I-330. D-503 is soon even going to need sick notes so he can see I-330 outside his allocated Personal Hours and her part in his Table of Sex Days.
His own brief notes for unknown readers are already becoming sick, disjointed.
And I-330 is dangerous, she teases D-503's previously dormant imagination, erupts into his dreams. I-330 is a rebel. Worse, she is not alone and she has designs on D-503 and the INTEGRAL.
While Zamyatin's Numbers are thinly developed as characters, serving mainly as vehicles for ideas, I-330 is a striking creation from a Russian naval engineer who served in Britain for two years during World War I. He must have assimilated notions of the women's liberation movement taking off in England's rigid post-Victorian society before returning to a homeland where he was supportive of the Marxist revolution.
I-330 is a courageous, free-thinking, sexually adventurous leader and breaker of barriers. She is viscerally opposed to the workings of the Benefactor, in whom it is much easier to see Lenin and notions of perfectibility through scientific socialism than the Big Brother of '1984'.