War with the newts
Written in 1936, two years before Capek's death and three years before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, War with the Newts is considered by many to be Capek's greatest book. Working in the "fantastic" satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Capek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders off the coast of an Indonesian island. Capek sardonically details all the reactions of the civilized world - from horror to scepticism, from intellectual fascination to mercantile opportunism - and the ultimate destruction from which it (and the newts) might not escape.
Stats for nerds
17recommend
29mentions
25people
2010–2026years
69% recommend31% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you seriously have this question, read "War with the Newts". Really do, make it your priority this week. If you did and this is a rhetoric question... Well, I do hope that if every single person on the planet would have read "War with the Newts" and made the right conclusions, maybe there would be a chance to change the course. But that's only because I choose to believe in miracles, otherwise I wouldn't know how to live.
(TL;DR: we won't.)
- It's strange to start a list of "books that you may never have heard of" with a novel which is a nominee to the 2020 Hugo Awards. I suppose that most of the regular readers of sci-fi haver heard of it.
A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.
If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".
- Čapek's "War With The Newts" is good too.
- It is an enjoyable story. My copy is a double edition with War with the Newts, which i think is actually better, if not as prophetic. Yet.
- Another irony is Capek did not really liked R.U.R. He was great author and journalist, read his War with the Newts (1936). RUR was his early theater game, it is a bit silly and has big plot holes.. Yet somehow it is his most known work.
- This is kinda required reading!
Also, while it's really talking about stuff going on at its own time, War with the Newts is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts
