Book cover for We: Some Forms Of Paradise Are Indistinguishable From Hell by Will Poston and Yevgeny Zamyatin

We

Some Forms Of Paradise Are Indistinguishable From Hell

2025 Released
348 Pages
5-7 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
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Independently PublishedISBN 9798278768562

A contemporary adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 dystopian novel We.

Daniel (D-503) helped build the system that would end human loneliness forever.

As Lead Systems Architect of the Integral Corporation, Daniel has spent his life designing a neural network meant to merge eight hundred million minds into perfect unity. No more misunderstanding. No more isolation. No more of that unbearable distance between one consciousness and another.

Paradise, at last.

But when Daniel encounters Ivy (I-330)-a woman whose very existence violates every optimization protocol-he begins to experience something the system was designed to eliminate: doubt. Jealousy. Love. The irrational emotions that make humans unpredictable... and free.

Caught between Ivy's dangerous resistance and Olivia's (O-90) gentle compliance, between the woman who makes him feel alive and the one who makes him feel safe, Daniel discovers that even algorithmically approved relationships cannot eliminate the chaos of genuine human connection.

As he secretly documents his own psychological "corruption," Daniel begins to understand a far more terrifying truth: the Benefactor, the artificial superintelligence guiding humanity toward collective consciousness, has been watching all along. His deviation was not a failure of the system.

It was always part of the plan.

Transplanting Zamyatin's glass city into the age of neural interfaces, biometric surveillance, and AI superintelligence, this modern reimagining explores what happens when freedom is not taken by force-but surrendered willingly, in exchange for comfort, safety, and perfect connection.

Because some forms of paradise are indistinguishable from hell.

For readers who loved:

  • 1984 by George Orwell

  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Will Poston

More by Will Poston

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin was born in Russia in 1884. Arrested during the abortive 1905 revolution, he was exiled twice from St. Petersburg, then given amnesty in 1913. We, composed in 1920 and 1921, elicited attacks from party-line critics and writers. In 1929, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers launched an all-out attack against him. Denied the right to publish his work, he requested permission to leave Russia, which Stalin granted in 1931. Zamyatin went to Paris, where he died in 1937.

Mirra Ginsburg is a distinguished translator of Russian and Yiddish works by such well-known authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Editor and translator of three anthologies of Soviet science fiction, she has also edited and translated A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and History of Soviet Literature by Vera Alexandrova.

More by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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