Top ten books about tyrants

Christopher Wilson is the author of several novels, including - Gallimauf's Gospel, Baa, Blueglass, Mischief, Fou, The Wurd, The Ballad of Lee Cotton, Nookie, and The Zoo. One of his ten top books about tyrants, as shared at the Guardian:

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Written in 1920, but never published in the Soviet Union, this dystopian novel of a totalitarian future, anticipates the biological controls of Brave New World and the Big Brotherish language of 1984. Governed by the Benefactor, Reason and One State, citizens are numbers in a transparent world of glass, with every waking moment governed by the (time) Table. Freedom is an “unorganised primitive state” incompatible with happiness. Sex is licensed. But outside the containing Green Wall there’s another world – of anarchy, freedom and furry people. With his writings suppressed, Zamyatin wrote to Stalin describing himself as a writer in waiting, until “it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas without cringing before little men”.

Read about the other entries on the list.

We is among Weston Williams's fifteen classic science fiction books and Lawrence Norfolk's five most memorable dystopias in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue