"A sendup of multiple early-20th century isms ... [Čapek's] cosmopolitanism
vents itself impishly in War with the Newts, whose text bristles with puns,
pseudo-erudite footnotes, and international foolery."
—Daniel Drabelle, Washington Post Book World
"A bracing parody of totalitarianism and technological overkill,
one of the most amusing and provocative books in its genre."
—Bruce Allen, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Čapek had in mind the totalitarian deluge that [in 1938] began to engulf Europe.
But his satire aims, above all, at human blindness and greed. The enemy is always within, he reminds us."
—Heda Kovaly, New York Times Book Review
"The new translation ... is wonderfully smooth;
indeed, it reads almost better than the Czech original."
—Times Literary Supplement
"Superb SF, shrewd satire, and a technical tour de force."
—Thomas M. Disch, Entertainment Weekly (A)
One of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century, an inspiration to writers from Orwell to Vonnegut, at last in a modern translation. Man discovers a species of giant, intelligent newts and learns to exploit them so successfully that the newts gain skills and arms enough to challenge man's place at the top of the animal kingdom. Along the way, Karel Čapek satirizes science, runaway capitalism, fascism, journalism, militarism, even Hollywood.
$11.95 paper, 240 pp., ISBN 0-945774-10-9.
It was hot and the height of the silly season, when nothing, but positively nothing, happens, when there are no politics, when there is not even a European crisis. Yet even the newspaper readership, sprawled out in agonies of boredom on sandy beaches or in the dappled shade of trees, demoralised by the heat, by nature, by the rural tranquility, and just by the simple healthy life of being on holiday, expects, with hopes dashed anew every day, that at least in their paper they'll find something new and refreshing, some murder perhaps or a war or an earthquake, in short Something. And if they don't find it, they throw down their papers and angrily declare that there isn't a thing, not a damned thing, in the paper, that it's not worth reading at all and that they'll stop taking it.
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