D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State,[4] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass (presumably to assist with mass surveillance).

[7] A few hundred years after the One State's conquest of the entire world, the spaceship INTEGRAL is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets.

Like all other citizens of the One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians.

I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for an impersonal sex visit; all of these are illegal according to the laws of the One State.

She takes him through secret tunnels inside the Ancient House to the world outside the Green Wall, which surrounds the city-state.

The Mephi uprising gathers strength; parts of the Green Wall have been destroyed, birds are repopulating the city and people start committing acts of social rebellion.

The dystopian society depicted in We is presided over by the Benefactor and is surrounded by a giant Green Wall to separate the citizens from primitive untamed nature.

[12] The war was over a rare substance only mentioned in the book through a metaphor; the substance was called "bread" as the "Christians gladiated over it"—as in Christians killed for sport in Roman gladiator games as a form of entertainment, "bread and circuses", suggesting a war that was meant to distract the population from a power grab by the government.

of the chief characters in WE are taken directly from the specifications of Zamyatin's favourite icebreaker, the Saint Alexander Nevsky, yard no.

[21] Zamyatin, influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, made the novel a criticism of the excesses of a militantly atheistic society.

D-503 also mentions that he is profoundly disturbed by the concept of the square root of −1—which is the basis for imaginary numbers, imagination having been deprecated by the One State.

Zamyatin's point, probably in light of the increasingly dogmatic Soviet government of the time, would seem to be that it is impossible to remove all the rebels against a system.

[24] Along with Jack London's The Iron Heel, We is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre.

The Soviet attempt at implementing Taylorism, led by Aleksei Gastev, may have immediately influenced Zamyatin's portrayal of the One State.

[28] However, in a letter to Christopher Collins in 1962, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H. G. Wells's utopias long before he had heard of We.

Further, Russell finds that "Orwell's novel is both bleaker and more topical than Zamyatin's, lacking entirely that ironic humour that pervades the Russian work".

There is a shared depiction by both Jerome and Zamyatin that individual and, by extension, familial love is a disruptive and humanizing force.

[40] Zamyatin's literary position deteriorated throughout the 1920s, and he was eventually allowed to emigrate to Paris in 1931, probably after the intercession of Maxim Gorky.

The novel was first published in English in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York in a translation by Gregory Zilboorg,[41] but its first publication in the Soviet Union had to wait until 1988,[42] when glasnost resulted in it appearing alongside George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[47] The film is technically similar to La Jetée (1962), directed by Chris Marker, and refers somewhat to THX 1138 (1971), by George Lucas, in the "religious appearance of the Well Doer".

[48] According to film critic Isabelle Arnaud, The Glass Fortress has a special atmosphere underlining a story of thwarted love that will be long remembered.

A two-part adaptation by Sean O'Brien and directed by Jim Poyser was broadcast on 18 and 25 April 2004 on BBC Radio 4's Classic Serial.

[51] The cast included Anton Lesser as D-503, Joanna Riding as I-330, Julia Routhwaite as O-90, Brigit Forsyth as U, Patrick Bridgeman as S and Don Warrington as R-13.

[54] In 2022, independent creator Doug Strain produced Beyond the Green Wall, a Dungeons and Dragons adventure based on the novel.