Through the first four hundred years after the publication of Utopia, the writers who dared look into the future followed, more or less, in Sir Thomas More’s footsteps. Anti-utopia as a literary genre belongs to the twentieth century. This is not necessarily a cause for jeremiads, invocations of the names of Stalin or Hitler, or other forms of hand-wringing. Just as to some people a pessimist is an informed optimist, anti-utopia may be construed as as an informed Utopia. Philosophically, both genres are traceable to Plato’s Republic. Whether that work should be labeled a Utopia or anti-utopia depends on your taste for benevolent rulers; and what ruler has ever declared himself malevolent?

Ask a more or less educated person about anti-utopia, and three names pop up almost automatically: Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin. Of the three, Orwell, with 1984, is undoubtedly the most popular, and for good reason: his writing is brilliantly simple, his ideas are easy to digest, and, in our politicized age, his frame of reference is first and foremost political. Huxley’s Brave New World, by contrast, is the outcry of an alarmed aesthete against mass culture, and, though interesting in its way (many of his “dire” predictions turned out to be so timid as to come true), not nearly so powerful or enduring as Orwell’s book.

It fell to Zamyatin to straddle politics and culture.

It fell to Zamyatin to straddle politics and culture. Despite having preceded the other two