War with the Newts
War with the Newts (
Válka s mloky in the original
Czech), also translated as
War with the Salamanders, is a science fiction story by
Czech author
Karel Čapek.
First published in 1936, it begins with the discovery of the "newts", relatively intelligent humanoid marine animals. Humans find them useful as cheap labour, but things then go wrong.
The story centers on the discovery of the "newts", relatively intelligent humanoid marine animals. The species is
Andrias scheuchzeri, which is in reality the
giant salamander (a fossil of which was once mistaken for a fossilized
antediluvian human).
Upon this discovery, humans quickly get the newts working for them, initially to gather pearls and later to do underwater earthworks in harbors and canals. Later, governments desiring territorial expansion try (but fail) to use them to build artificial islands and continents in the sea.
After some time, however, the newts organize, stop obeying the humans, and set about to blow up the Earth's continents in order to create the shallow
littoral waters that are their ideal habitat. Ironically, the newts themselves cannot manufacture the necessary explosives and metal tools (indeed, under water they probably cannot manufacture anything), but they receive these from the human governments; each government considers its own newts a military defence force, and feels it necessary to support them in order to keep pace with others. The arms race backfires as quite a few nations suddenly sink, including
Germany and much of the area of
China.
As the story ends, humanity is on the verge of extinction, being unable to stop the newts or even to disentangle itself from them. Here the narrator addresses the reader directly, in a chapter called "Author Converses with Himself", and proposes a possible means of extinguishing the newts while preserving the human race.
There are obvious similarities to his earlier
Rossum's Universal Robots, but also some original themes.
Robert Zubrin claims that War with the Newts partly inspired his novel
The Holy Land.
The book is a dark
satire, poking fun extensively at the contemporary European politics, including
colonialism,
fascism and
Nazism, segregation in America, and the
arms race. One particular gem is the mentioned research of a German scientist who has determined that the German newts are actually a superior
Nordic race, and that as such they have a right to expand their
living space at the expense of the inferior breeds of newts.
*
Czech literature*
Karel Čapek*
R.U.R.*
Reviews at Amazon (spoilers)*
Basic details of a BBC radio version*
Capek and his work*
An unauthorised translation
