Мы (1924)

Published in English as We. This is the template for the modern dystopia: a spacecraft engineer, D-503, lives in the One State, where citizens are numbered, buildings are made of glass so everyone can be watched, and happiness is treated as a problem of engineering. His diary records the moment certainty starts to crack. Its warning is about the seduction of a perfectly rational order, which is why it still provokes argument. Soviet censors refused it publication as ideologically undesirable, and George Orwell, reviewing it in 1946, judged that Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Read it to see where Huxley and Orwell began.