A powerful urtext of contemporary dystopias, We is a panoptic socialist dystopia, expressing concern about the loss of identity in a too-rational society, where emotions and individual identity are considered useless. The same concern can be found in a host of later works but few as intense and elegant as here. Zamyatin's terse, a times desperate, prose, claustrophobically internally focalized, creates a tense reading experience.

The mathematical subtext seems at first trivial, a simple way of developing the protagonist within an overly rational society. But as the story progresses and the revolutionary aspects takes force, it becomes evident that the tension between the finite and infinite is paramount, leading to one of the saddest final sentences in science fiction: "Because reason should win."