Minor Thoughts from me to you

If you'd as recently as yesterday pitched me a story told through diary entries about love between two citizens of a collectivist government set in the distant future - a future in which the very word "I" is no longer remembered - I would have naturally assumed you were talking about Ayn Rand's Anthem, a novella she published in 1938.

As it turns out, the premise and general thrust of the book was undoubtedly pulled from another novel, written and published in Soviet Russia fully six years before Ayn Rand herself would immigrate from the USSR to America: We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

I discovered this by accident; I was flipping through my mother's copy of a book entitled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, skimming the chronologically-listed entries, when I stumbled upon We's description:

"We is a prototypical dystopian novel... The novel consists of a series of diary entries by D-503, a mathematician and a thoroughly orthodox citizen of the authoritarian, futuristic state to which he belongs. The diary sets out as a celebration of state doctrine, which dictates that happiness, order, and beauty can be found only in unfreedom, in the cast-iron tenets of mathematical logic and of absolute power. As the diary and novel continue, D-503 comes under the subversive influence of a beautiful dissident... He finds himself drawn towards... the anarchism of a private love. He no longer identifies with 'we'..."

The writer of the entry declares it "not a straightforward denunciation of communism, but a moving, blackly comic examination of the contradictions between freedom and happiness that state socialism produces."

The parallels to Anthem are obvious and too close to be coincidence, especially considering the two respective authors hail from the same country. And I'm not, as it turns out, the only one who's noticed; [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella) lists the similarities and differences between the two.

The question is of course begged, then, as to whether those similarities listed constitute a case of plagiarism. Ms. Rand being my favorite modern author for the last decade, I'm certainly biased, but my general understanding of creativity leads me to answer in the negative. Beginning from the same premise as an already-published work, even knowingly, is not plagiarism if a story proceeds to explore different possibilities allowed for by that base. This, even Wikipedia agrees Rand does.

Really, Rand couldn't help but do so; We _is a story about Collectivism gone as far as it can possibly go, but its conclusions as to where "as far as it can possibly go" is don't mesh with Rand's own beliefs. _We involves a society's evolution to the point of colonizing new planets; Rand cannot imagine that a collectivist state would ultimately result in anything but a new age of barbarism, so the collectivists of her Anthem are, many centuries after their ancestors built skyscrapers, technologically capable of manufacturing only candles. We is a comedy; Anthem is clearly frustrated, even enraged. We declares communism to be reasonable but ultimately monstrous; Anthem objects that there is anything reasonable in communism. Finally, We results in the protagonist's "reeducation", which is to say his demise; Anthem results in his triumph.

This last detail should not be overlooked as simply an arbitrary difference in plot. Involving any other two writers, it very well could be taken as such, but an important principle of Rand's Objectivist philosophy is the impotency of evil. The triumph of the hero in her books is a statement regarding the nature of the universe, which she believed "benevolent" (the only exclusion being her character Kira in We The Living, who's controversial death still makes Rand's followers uncomfortable).

Both books are anti-collectivist and involve several sci-fi propositions, but each proclaims a very different worldview - justification a-plenty for two separate stories.

Or even more, maybe, because I learned one more surprising fact from Wikipedia today when I looked up the book; _Anthem _entered the public domain in 1966, after Ms. Rand failed to renew its copyright.

Anybody have a good idea for an Anthem-based story?