War with the Newts
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War with the Newts (Válka s mloky in the original Czech), also translated as War with the Salamanders, is a satirical science fiction story by Czech author Karel Čapek.
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[edit] Plot introduction
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 then things go wrong.
[edit] Plot summary
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.
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
There are obvious similarities to his earlier Rossum's Universal Robots, but also some original themes.
[edit] Allusions/references from other works
Robert Zubrin claims that War with the Newts partly _inspired his novel The Holy Land.
[edit] Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
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.
The author's opinion of the United States' social problems also appears very pessimistic, as whenever that country is mentioned as dealing with a crisis, American mobs "lynch negroes" as scapegoats. Sometimes the newts are shown in the same manner as the blacks, as when a white woman claims to have been raped by one of them. In spite of the physical impossibility of the act, people believe her and carry out newt lynchings.
