War with the Newts by Karel Capek

A brilliant work of dark satire

Czech author Karel Capek is most famous for coining the term “robot” in his 1920 play entitled R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). There is much more to this author, however, than just the answer to that trivia question. The more I delve into Capek’s catalog of works, the more I come to admire him as one of the better modernist European writers of the early 20th century. Like his countryman Franz Kafka, Capek’s fiction is often innovative, quirky, and profound. While most of Capek’s published writings fall outside the realm of science fiction, he is best known for two works in that genre: R.U.R. and his 1936 novel War with the Newts.

Captain van Toch, a Czech seaman (apparently not an oxymoron, even for this landlocked nation) leads a pearl-hunting expedition to a South Pacific island. In a secluded cove, he discovers a race of intelligent, chimp-sized, bipedal salamanders living in an underwater community. What would mankind do if we discovered another intelligent species on our planet? Breed them for slave labor, of course! Van Toch soon has the Newts harvesting pearls for him. He transports them to other islands and coastlines all over the world to increase his pearl production. Soon, due to their prolific breeding, the Newts are no longer van Toch’s little secret. As their population grows millions upon millions, the Newts become common knowledge and are taken for granted as manual laborers in many diverse industries.

From his 1922 debut novel The Absolute at Large, Capek resurrects the character of G. H. Bondy, a Czech industrialist who invests in van Toch’s pearl scheme. War with the Newts starts out in very much the same lighthearted humorous tone as that earlier book. While The Absolute at Large, however, just read like one joke repeated over and over again, War with the Newts is delightfully wide-ranging in its satirical targets. Capek manages to lampoon imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, nationalism, the Nazis, American racism, slavery, British pompousness, the League of Nations, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, religion, and more. War with the Newts is truly an ingenious and innovative work of sci-fi satire.

If there is a flaw to this novel, it’s that Book One is so different in style and tone from Books Two and Three. Book One is written largely in the silly, almost slapstick style of The Absolute at Large. There are even a couple of unnecessary chapters that satirize movie stars and the film industry. Books Two and Three, however, present a dark dystopian future crafted with meticulous and insightful detail. The reader can’t help but admire the levels of depth that Capek builds into this world he has created. The “Newt problem” is explored through political, social, economic, religious, cultural, and evolutionary dimensions, among others. The centerpiece of the novel, Book Two, is a brilliant faux scientific report on the Newts, complete with footnotes, that is permeated by between-the-lines revelations of human cruelty. Even when he’s depicting atrocities, Capek slyly works wry and biting humor into the telling.

A major focus of mockery in the novel is the slave trade. The exploitation of the Newts very much reflects that of Africans in prior centuries. Why write a book satirizing slavery in the 1930s? Likely Capek could see what was coming with the rise of the Nazis, who would soon treat many segments of the European population in much the same inhuman fashion in which the Newts are treated here. A passage on the use of Newts for biological experimentation presages the horrors of Joseph Mengele’s sadistic “research.” World War I was an extravagant showcase of human cruelty, and by the 1930s Capek could look to multiple instances of genocide taking place throughout the world and see the writing on the wall for the next world war. While there may be a dark sense of humor to Capek’s social commentary, one can also learn much from this book. Even today, many of the points made and issues addressed are still sadly valid and relevant.