The Absolute at Large

Immediately after finishing War with the Newts I started reading another of Karel Čapek's novels,The Absolute at Large.

Written in 1922, the story begins at what was a future date at the time of writing, New Year's Day 1943. An engineer and inventor, Rudy Marek has created a type of reactor which can produce cheap and abundant energy. After placing an ad in a newspaper, Marek is approached by tycoon, G.H.Bondy, head of the Metallo-Electrical Company.

Marek explains to Bondy that one of the main by-products of the production of the energy is the release of the absolute into the environment. The absolute is described as the spiritual essence that permeates all matter and those people exposed to the absolute undergo an over powering religious experience.

According to the wikipedia article on the novel, R. D. Mullen called the novel "one of the genuine masterpieces of SF" and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. I highly recommend the novel to Sci Fi enthusiasts.

As a side note, a tycoon named G.H.Bondy is also prominent in War with the Newts yet events in the two stories preclude the two G.H.Bondy's from being the same character.

My copy of The Absolute at Large comes from fadedpage.com. A newer translation by David Wyllie can be purchased from amazon.com.

War With The Newts

A few days ago, I discovered the work of Czech writer Karel Čapek. It was Čapek's play R.U.R. that first introduced the word "robot".

I had been able to locate a copy of the play at Project Gutenberg. I felt that it was important to read the play, as it had been the first work on "robots", though I must say, I was a little disappoint in the play.

In spite of this disappointment I began to look further into Karel Čapek's life and work. In the wikipedia article on R.U.R., mention was made of one of Čapek's novels, War with the Newts. At the time, I had misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article ("Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant class in human society.") and wrongly assumed that the novel dealt with robots.

After locating and downloading a copy of the novel from Project Gutenberg of Australia I learned otherwise. The "non-humans" in the novel are newts or salamanders.

(The copy of the novel at Project Gutenberg of Australia is in html format which I had to print as a pdf and convert to mobi in order to read on my Kindle. It can also be purchased at amazon.com.)

The novel has been described as a dark satirical science fiction novel and acclaimed as the first dystopian novel.

Personally, I can't speak more highly of the novel. It is, at times, quite funny. And yes, dark.

Written in 1936, Čapek's work is highly critical of Germany's fascism; he doesn't spare the segregated United States, and none of the European countries of that era do well in Čapek's view.

I'm quite sure that had Čapek written in English, his work would be compared today to the likes of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. He had been nominated for Nobel Prize in Literature seven times. It's thought that he was never awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature because his work was offensive to the Nazis, and the Swedish board did not want to risk Hitler's displeasure.

We all know the Nobel can be political.

Robots in Stalin's Soviet Union

In preparation for a recent post on Karel Čapek's Robots I learned of a 1935 Soviet science fiction film entitled Loss of Sensation. Although the film is in no way based on the play by Karel Čapek, but rather a Ukrainian novel "Iron Riot" by Volodimir Vladko, the robots in the film have "R.U.R." stamped upon their chests. This is the film's only reference to the play. Calling the machines "robots" and the use of "R.U.R." shows just how influential the play was from the beginning.

The film is in the public domain and can be seen on Youtube with English subtitles.

The film was made during Stalin's time and I was curious to see what was permitted. There is no mention of the country where the story takes place, though obviously it is not the Soviet Union. The villains in the film are the capitalists and their flunkies in the military. Naturally, the heroes in the film are the proletariat workers.

The most bizarre aspect in the film, from my point of view is the way in which the robots' creator, Jim Ripple, controls them. They were designed to be controlled by sound, and at one point Ripple plays the saxophone to make the robots dance.

Although there are English subtitles, I found it helpful to refer back to the wikipedia article while watching the film.

Karel Čapek's Robots

If one looks into the history of robots in fiction, you discover that the first mention of the word is in a play written by Czech writer Karel Čapek - R.U.R. (subtitled Rossum's Universal Robots in English translations).

Recently, I was able to track down a copy of the play at Project Gutenberg. The robots in Čapek's play are artificial people made from synthetic organic matter rather than machinery. Like many stories of robots that have come down to us, Čapek's robots take over the world - though their reign is short lived.

It's very difficult for me to look objectively at R.U.R.. There are many more books or plays on robots that are better reads than this play, but it was the first, and we have to judge the work in that light. For that reason alone, it's worth reading.

In addition to plays, Čapek' wrote several sci-fi novels before the invention of sci-fi as a separate genre. Many of these books are available at amazon.com, though I have chosen to download two of his novels that are available for free - The Absolute at Large (available as mobi at Fadedpage) and The War with the Newts (available as html at project gutenberg australia). In case of The War with the Newts, I printed the html as a pdf and then converted the pdf to mobi.

According to a wikipedia article, The War with the Newts takes a different approach to the relationship between humans and non-humans, where the non-humans become a servant class in human society. I'm a few pages into that novel at this writing......much too early for comment.


Update: 

After I began reading The War with the Newts, I soon realized that I had misread the one sentence description of the novel in the Wikipedia article of R.U.R.. The non-humans in the novel are not robots as I had interpreted the sentence, but rather a different sort of non-human. The above text in this blog has been edited to correct that error.

Newly Discovered Spider Named For Greta Thunberg

In a move that I understand is meant to be a compliment, German arachnologist Peter Jager has named a new genus of huntsman spiders from Madagascar Thunberga gen. nov. after Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.

Jager had previously named another species of (sexually dimorphic) huntsman spider Heteropoda davidbowie after - you guessed it - David Bowie.

None of the articles reporting this news have mentioned if the Thunberga gen. nov. is also sexually dimorphic.

Renaming U.S. Military Bases

Prior to today, I had never given much thought as to the ins and outs, the hows and whys, of the naming of U.S. military bases. The only U.S. Army base of whose name I had knowledge was Fort McPherson in Atlanta Georgia. I had been watching a documentary on the Battle of Atlanta when I first learned of the Union General James Birdseye McPherson who died during the battle and would later have the fort named in his honor.

I was completely surprised to learn that there are 10 Army bases around the country named for Confederate military officers, including the military base where I was born, Fort Benning.

Fort Benning was named for Henry L. Benning who was active in Southern U.S. politics and an ardent secessionist, bitterly opposing abolition and the emancipation of slaves. From his biography, I learned that Benning was about as despicable as a human could be. It is really an absolute disgrace to have anything - much less a military base - named for him.

Sadly, President Trump opposes efforts to remove Confederate commanders' names from military bases. The President could go a long way toward healing some of the pain arising now in the United States. Frankly, the bases should have been renamed years ago - long before Trump became President.

Understanding U.S. politics and the need for votes years ago, I know why these bases were named as they were. It was all about votes - Southern Democrat votes. But, just as I can't see an American military base being named after Erwin Rommel,Saddam Hussein, or Ho Chi Minh, I can't see the naming of a U.S. military after any Confederate General.

The President should be calling for the renaming, not defending the current names.