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.

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.