3 minute read
WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin; trans. by Bela Shayevich
a most unusual duke
WE
Zamyatin, Yevgeny Trans. by Bela Shayevich Ecco/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $16.99 paper | Nov. 2, 2021 978-0-06-306844-5
The founding document of dystopian literature, written in the Soviet Union in 1921, comes in for a fresh translation. As Margaret Atwood notes in her introduction, this novel can be seen as a blueprint for the totalitarian regimes that would arise in the 20th century: Stalinism, fascism, Maoism, all those political entities in which the state is a machine that feeds on its people. Set in the 26th century, the novel imagines a world in which, following a Two Hundred Years’ War that concluded five centuries before—in our century, that is—the human world is organized under the aegis of the One State. Its protagonist, a “number” called D-503, is “just one of the One State’s mathematicians,” part of a crew that is building a spaceship called the INTEGRAL whose occupants will likely, the official newspaper proclaims, “encounter unfamiliar beings on alien planets who may yet live in savage states of freedom.” No such problem in the One State, where everything is under the “beneficent yoke of reason.” The One State is made up of cities walled off against nature and its “dense, green wildernesses,” all gleaming steel and glass. A smoothly turning cog of the machines that run the place, D–503 encounters a bohemian woman named I–330 who smokes cigarettes and drinks booze, all very much verboten, and who leads him to question his place in the brave new world. His unexercised loins stir, and he begins to think that visiting the other side of the wall might be a good thing. Alas, in a regime where “We sacrifice to our God, the One State, offering a calm, thoughtful, rational sacrifice,” such thoughts do not go unpunished. The plot is thin, but Zamyatin’s all-seeing state is sufficiently chilling all the same. Translator Shayevich does a good job of preserving his affectless, sometimes nearly robotic prose, and the book is highly readable—and indeed should be read.
A science-fiction classic, many of whose contours have become all too real.
romance
A MOST UNUSUAL DUKE
Allen, Susanna Sourcebooks Casablanca (312 pp.) $8.99 paper | Dec. 28, 2021 978-1-72823-039-9
When the prince regent tells a widow to marry a bear shifter, how can she refuse? Beatrice, dowager Marchioness of Castleton, never wants to marry again. She was forced into her first marriage and then discovered her cruel husband was a versipellis, or shapeshifter, revealing to her an entire paranormal wing of the beau monde—including the prince regent. Arthur, Duke of Osborn, another versipellis and cousin to the prince, also doesn’t want to marry, as it would betray his childhood vow to never step into his role as an Alpha. But Prince George has other plans for the two of them, and those plans require a quick and quiet wedding in the back of a chapel. After the ceremony, Beatrice and Arthur quickly agree that theirs will be a “white marriage,” meaning it won’t be consummated, and she gets to work meeting his staff and repairing his estate, still in shambles, destroyed by the man who killed his father when he was a child. They settle into their unexpected new lives, separate though in the same house, but when his sister and her family come to visit, Beatrice discovers that the versipellian world is far more diverse and kind than she experienced in her first marriage. Having guests also brings the newlyweds closer, and as proximity begins to build a powerful attraction between them, they shift from a white marriage to a more passionate “cordial affiliation.” But the marriage can’t truly be consummated until Arthur is finally willing to overcome his childhood trauma and face down his enemies—which may be too much to ask. The second book in Allen’s Regency shape-shifter series is, like the first, A Wolf in Duke’s Clothing (2021), an enjoyable combination of subgenres, fully devoted to the tropes of both. The book moves effortlessly between paranormal lingo and Regency touches, and though the plot is fairly basic, the dialogue is clever and funny. Readers equally interested in Prince George’s historic fashion sense and shapeshifter pack dynamics will be thrilled.
