War With the Newts Karel Capek

In the preface to his very unsettling short story "The Ninth of Av", Dan Simmons pointed out a bias in science fiction publishing: while most science fiction written in English is translated into other languages, very little of non-English sci-fi gets to American readers. As a result, the American audience misses out on good fiction that isn't American, Canadian, British, or Australian.

Well, here's a great example. I found this book by accident, at a used bookstore, a tattered reprint of the 1932 original. If the name Karel Capek rings a bell, it's because he's the Czechoslovakian who coined the term robot back in 1920, in his play ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS. And while he may be remembered as a social commentator in the style of George Orwell or H.G. Wells, it should be noted that he has a good respect for science as it fits into his story: a Dutch sea captain in the East Indies of the 1930's happens upon a species of large salamanders, or newts, living off the shore of a particular island. They can walk upright, out of the water, for limited periods of time, have prehensile forelimbs, and can vocalize, with an impressive mimicry of human speech. But they're fairly unsophisticated (other than their penchant for building dams and artificial reefs), so once captured they make for easy, cheap labor. Capek sets up a commerce in newts as a Swiftian parable on human slave trade; and for the most part, it works very well. By the time the newts come to be integral to the world's industrial and maritime economies, there arise debates about newt rights and the role of newts in human society...just as newts begin to coalesce into what could pass for a civilization of their own. And a slave revolt can't be far behind....

I really like H.G. Wells, not so much for his social commentary (which was fairly progressive for his day) as his attention to scientific detail. Allow me to call him, and of course Jules Verne, the first writers of what can be called hard science fiction (as opposed to most of the sci-fi of the 1930's and 40's, which don't seem to be much interested in the factual or realistic basis for a given scenario--culminating in Ray Bradbury, who is just short of scientifically illiterate). I just read a book of Wells' short stories earlier this year, and I was impressed by how intriguing and inventive his ideas were. Underlying it was a subtle sense of humor, as evidenced in stories like "In the Abyss" or "Aepyornis Island"--and Capek has a similar tone. I'm very curious to read Capek's other stuff, including R.U.R., of course.

And, come to think of it, the only other modern science fiction writer I've read that's had to be translated into English was Stanislaw Lem. Oh, and Jorge Luis Borges (who's sci-fi, I'll argue that any day--). So maybe we in English could try to understand the musings of other cultures, once in a while.