We: The book that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World

In a utopian future society, where all social unrest has been engineered away, a man has an awakening. Starting as a happy worker drone, he meets a woman who reveals to him the reality of life outside the state's control - the glories of chaotic nature in the world and in the heart. They become entwined with a conspiracy against the state, and eventually try to escape beyond the walls of the state's control... only to meet betrayal, failure, and a dark ending in the glorious light of the state's total control.

Sound familiar? It's probably because you've read Orwell's nineteen eighty-four, which he wrote eight months after he read We, wrote a review of it, and said he was taking it as the model for his next novel. Or Huxley's Brave New World.

Or maybe you've read Vonnegut's Player Piano, which of Vonnegut said he 'cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We'. You might even have come across other plays on the theme, such as Ayn Rand's Anthem or Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, written while Nabakov was reading We. Or even possibly Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

The tale is familiar, but the satirical and farcical comedy is a delight all of its own.