We - by Yevgeny Zamyatin (translted by Natasha Randall)

Just finished reading this novel over the weekend. It was our latest staff read at Westwinds. I have to admit that I wasn't excited about reading it at first. I'm not usually a novel reader and I already have a long list of books I want to read this year, so I put it off until the night before our staff meeting where we had to have read the first 30 pages. I was hooked after the first two chapters.

It was like a mix between the Matrix, AI, Enemy of the State, and I-Robot. The funny thing is, this book was originally written in 1920. In fact, it's considered the earliest forerunner of the science fiction genre. In the Foreword, Randall says that George Orwell, author of 1984, read it, and Orwell thought that Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, had probably read it.

Personally, I believe it is quite possible that the Wachowski brothers read this novel before writing the Matrix. Most parallel was the description of "the benefactor" in We, and "the Architect" in the Matrix. I also saw similarities between Neo in the Matrix and D-503, the main character in We. Even some frequent words in We, like "cypher" and "epoch" served as character names in the matrix. Two scenes felt almost identical to scenes in the Matrix. One where D-503 encounters a "soft" reflection, like Neo discovering the soft mirror. And the second when D-503 falls out of the city and sees life as it really is outside.

The ending is quite different, however, and unexpected. Overall, I loved it.