The War with the Newts - Tapa blanda

An unjustly forgotten masterpiece of anti-utopian fantasy that is possibly the equal of Orwell's Animal Farm. Capek writes of an avaricious Dutch seaman who discovers a race of bipedal and intelligent newts in Sumatra that is initially lauded as the equal of the human race, but that is subsequently conscripted into the service of man and then . . . By turns hilarious and grim, but consistently and scathingly insightful into the nature of human nature, and a book that you simply must read. Very Highest Recommendation.

(Editor's Note: When Karel Capek is mentioned by English-speaking critics, it is usually in a parenthetical comment that it was he who introduced the term "Robot" into contemporary literature, in a brilliant play about robot rebellion, Rossum's Universal Robots, currently only available in several anthologies, such as Toward the Radical Center.)

Originally written in 1936, two years before Capek's death and three years before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, War with the Newts is considered by many to be Capek's greatest book. Working in the "fantastic" satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Capek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders off the coast of an Indonesian island. Capek sardonically details all the reactions of the civilized world - from horror to skepticism, from intellectual fascination to mercantile opportunism - and the ultimate destruction from which it (and the newts) might not escape.