War With the Newts [Hardcover]

Karel Capek (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1976 | ISBN-10: 040414649X | ISBN-13: 978-0404146498

Perhaps Capek's greatest novel, "War With the Newts" is both charming and frightening: a fantasy in which human history is gradually - but appallingly - altered by the discovery on a remote island of a race of highly intelligent salamanders.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Best known as the inventor of the modern word "robot," Karel Čapek was a Czech writer who dabbled in detective stories and fairy tales before making his name as a playwright and the author of this singular science-fiction satire. In this thinly entertaining and thinly veiled rumination on fascism and colonialism, an enslaved a race of fast-evolving newts grows a collective consciousness that results in their forming a "Salamander Syndicate" that declares war on humanity. --Jason Kirk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Issued to celebrate the centennial of Capek's birth, these three volumes testify to the versatility and timeless appeal of one of the first Czech writers to achieve world acclaim. Toward the Radical Center contains, in new or revised translations, a selection of Capek's charming short stories, essays, and travel sketches, as well as four of his major plays, including R.U.R. , a brilliant drama about the destruction of humankind by artificial people, Rossum's Universal Robots. The dangers of runaway technology, militarism, and greed are further explored in Capek's hilarious satire, War with the Newts. When Captain van Toch discovers giant, intelligent newts on a remote island off Sumatra, he teaches them to use knives to find food, fight off sharks, and collect pearls for him. When he dies, his partners turn his friendly venture into a huge international business with the newts (rapidly growing in numbers) and with the tools and supplies for them. The newts are taught to read, to build massive underwater projects, and to protect the shores of the countries that bought them. They become an essential and powerful part of the industrial machine, and thus warnings about their potential danger to humankind go unheeded. In the end the newts start to blow up continents to create new shores for themselves, while governments argue impotently. Issued in a new, vibrant translation, this immensely entertaining novel has lost none of its relevance and spark. Considered Capek's masterpiece, the trilogy Three Novels explores the plurality of a man and his life, the impossibility of understanding all facets of truth. In Hordubal, events leading to the murder of a brooding, solitary farmer in a small Carpathian village are presented from the perspective of the victim, the villagers, and the police. Although Hordubal's wife and her lover are convicted, their motives and actions, as well as Hordubal's, remain partly mysterious. Meteor concerns an unknown, unconscious man brought into a hospital after a plane crash and attempts by a nurse, poet, and clairvoyant to penetrate the mystery of his life. The stories they derive are convincing and at points they converge, yet the real truth cannot be known. In An Ordinary Life , a retired railway official's attempt to examine his life reveals powerful and complex aspects of his personality that have shaped his seemingly ordinary life. If you must choose, select War with the Newts , but all three volumes are recommended.
- Marie Bednar, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Ams Pr Inc (June 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 040414649X
• ISBN-13: 978-0404146498
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,796,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And I Stood Upon the Sand of the Sea, April 13, 2005

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Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War with the Newts (Paperback)

and Saw a Beast Rise up Out of the Sea.

This apocalyptic vision from the book of Revelations is a fitting introduction to Karel Capek's dystopian masterpiece, War With the Newts. Capek described in an interview how the idea for War With The Newts came to him and serves as a good synopsis of the book:

"I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea. . . . Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation?" Out of this thought process War With the Newts Was Born.

The plot is straightforward. The master of a tramp steamer, Captain van Toch, comes across a rather curious breed of newts in an isolated lagoon near Sumatra. He discovers that they are intelligent and capable of communication. They lack, however, the ability to open easily oysters for food because of their short arms. He takes a knife and shows them how to use it. Next thing you know they have used his knife to open thousands of oysters, enough to provide the newts with food and the Captain with a large supply of pearls. Captain van Toch takes groups of newts and plants them in lagoons across the coastlines and lagoons of Asia. They are extraordinarily industrious. Before long newts become a worldwide rage. Every nation in the world uses newts to perform Herculean tasks of underwater and coastal development. The newts do not demand salaries. They merely ask for heavy equipment and munitions to facilitate these underwater projects. In short order the manufacture and supply of arms and equipment for newts becomes the single most important part of the world's economy.

Despite some increasingly violent skirmishes between newts and man no nation is willing to cease providing weapons to the newts. Before long the newts revolt, led by the Great Salamander (an apparent parody of Hitler), and announce that they will start destroying the earth, continent by continent in order to provide more coastline for the growing newt population. Despite this threat the nations of the earth continue to provide arms to the newts. The resultant battle is over quickly. Mountains are leveled, continents are turned into a series of islands and what is left of man finds its way to the Alps, or Rocky Mountains, or Himalayas.

As the story concludes, the author engages in a dialogue with himself and asks himself whether this is the end of man. After a great deal of soul searching he responds that perhaps the newts will take on all of the characteristics of the human race and find a way to destroy themselves. When that day occurs, perhaps humanity will recover what it gave away so readily.

War With the Newts is a fascinating book on many levels. The idea that the story is premised on the notion of concurrent evolutionary trends predates much landmark work that has been done since the book was written. It is also important to note that War With the Newts was written in 1936. The Nazis had obtained full control of Germany, Mussolini's fascists ruled Italy, and Stalin's purges were in full swing. Capek was devoted to the new Czech Republic and was an ardent proponent of the ideals of democracy. By 1936 the rest of Europe had already taken many strides down the road to appeasement. Capek's pessimistic vision of the fate of humanity is well grounded in contemporary events. War With the Newts may be viewed as much as a parable of contemporary events as a foretelling of a dark future. Finally, Capek is an excellent writer. His prose is full of wit and wry diversions. His chapter on the mating habits of the newts struck me as a classic parody of the human mating habits of his contemporary Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.

The following excerpt from a poem written by Capek after the bombing of the town of Badajoz during the Spanish Civil War serves as a fitting summation of the world view that permeates War With the Newts.

When this century collapses, dead at last,

and its sleep within the dark tomb has begun,

come, look down upon us, world, file past

and be ashamed of what our age has done.

Inscribe our stone, that everyone may see

what this dead era valued most and best:

science, progress, work, technology

and death - but death we prized above the rest.

Almost seventy years after its publication the message of War With the Newts still resonates.

Capek's War With the Newts is a wonderful, thought provoking book.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Novel Still Worth Reading, August 18, 2004

By 

Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War with the Newts (Paperback)

Though perhaps best known for coining the word "robot" in his wonderful play R.U.R., Capek also wrote a number of stories and novels. Of his novels, War With the Newts is probably the best known. And with good reason. It is an excellent story.

Flirting with the apocalyptic tradition in science fiction, this novel tells the story of the discovery of large, intelligent sea creatures off a small island "west of Sumatra." Initially curiosities, their intelligence makes them excellent workers for underwater projects for humans. Unfortunately for humans, these creatures are in fact quite smart enough and, over the course of a few years, develop to the point where they can challenge people for the domination of the earth. Which they do quite effectively.

Written in a number of styles--journalistic and scientific in addition to straightforward prose that switches points of view--it is very engaging. Granted, the prose is a little more formal as befits a novel written in the 1930's and the translator has kept that formal feeling but I am quite fond of this style. And Capek's perceptive examination of the politics of this period in his tale of newts and man is impressive.

Capek is often thought of as a science fiction writer but, as is the case with many writers of this genre, his appeal is much wider. Otherwise, why would his novels and plays still be read nearly 80 years later. Anyone with a taste for good, intellectual writing would enjoy this novel.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Will the Newts Have Need of Me?, April 18, 2008

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Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War with the Newts (European Classics) (Paperback)

Of all the science-fiction books I read in my teenage years, this is the one that stimulated my mind the most, and the one I've re-read most often. It's the story of a discovery of another intelligent species, not in space but on an island lost in the Pacific. The new species are man-sized newts, with language and smart enough to acquire H. sapiens technology quickly. Eventually the newts and humans go to war, and that's all the plot I'll give you.
I loved to watch newts when I was a kid. In California especially, there are several species with interesting life-styles. Taricha torosa is a pretty brown and red newt with pebbly skin. It lives most of the year on land, but returns en masse to water to mate. It's a graceful, gentle, slow-moving creature with remarkably human "hands" and large eyes. That's the newt I imagine as the prototype for Capek's man-sized newt. T.torosa is also deadly poisonous... if you eat it. There's an evolutionary battle occurring in California right now! The newts' chief predator is the garter snake; snakes have been evolving tolerance for the newt's poison, which would kill the hugest other predator. In turn, the newts have been evolving ever stronger toxins. Recently, a population of snakes was discovered, in an isolated eco-zone, which has evolved better resistance and thus has gained the advantage in the endless evolutionary race.
In any case, reading Capek's book, I felt much like a traitor to my species. In every way, justice seemed to be on the newts' side. Obviously Capek has intuited what might well be the scenario of the future, when H. sapiens encounters another intelligence in the galaxy. Let's hope that species has evolved farther ethically than we humans have.