This book holds a ton of historical interest, written in the young USSR in ca. 1921 and banned there until the Perestroika era, and furthermore standing as Orwell's acknowledged inspiration for 1984. If I were judging it on grounds of historical interest, it would earn more stars.

But as a piece of writing, I found it rather a mess. I didn't really follow huge chunks of the narrative. It felt like there were lots of non sequiturs, as in OneState having everyone living in glass houses (hello, Panopticon), apparently possessing technology to have a listening membrane overlaid everywhere, and having a Table of Hours that tightly regulates the Numbers' (citizens') every waking moment, and yet D-503 seems able to wander around a fair bit, and I-330 is plotting, drinking, smoking, etc. etc. it just didn't line up for me. There is a ton of broken dialogue, and one presumes that Zamyatin imagines that the reader can fill in the blanks, but I, for one, was left often wondering what the the hell was going on. "And you-- argghhh! Really? So you just ..... ? But what about the --?" What, indeed? What indeed.

Anyway, you get the point. A neat project, but I found the execution wanting.