Books by Karel Čapek
“I think Čapek is an unsung genius. He was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize…This last novel is a masterwork. War with the Newts feels like it’s looking directly at our present moment…Wherever you are, whether you read it in the 80s or the 90s or the 2000s, it feels like this novel is looking right at you. It’s about us right now…Read this novel in a book club. It seems to retell modern history, and then reach straight into the present, all tied together by this absurd conceit of precocious newts. And then there’s that little bit of that last-ditch optimism, which is the presence of Čapek’s incredibly humane way of thinking. He always leaves us with a sliver of hope that we can do better than invent the robots (or newts) that will replace our inefficiencies with their rationalized infallibility.” Read more...
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi
Yvonne Howell, Literary Scholar
“R.U.R. stands for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’. First of all, this is the play that gave us the word ‘robot’. Čapek had this idea: his stage is filled with humanoid, marching, working, mechanical humans. He originally thought to call them labori, which would be a Slavic-ish plural of the foreign word ‘labor.’ But his brother said, ‘No, let’s make a noun out of the Slavic root word for work/labor: rob-‘. So he called them robots, and there we are to this day…The crucial element of robot design in the play is that they should not have a soul. I think nowadays we would say consciousness, but although Čapek was not a religious person, he referred to it as a soul. The ideal robot worker does his job more quickly and more accurately than any human precisely because it does not feel pain, fear, hunger, love, or any other human emotion.” Read more...
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi
Yvonne Howell, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by Karel Čapek were recommended
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi, recommended by Yvonne Howell
Science fiction writers on the other side of the Iron Curtain were profoundly free-thinking intellects and have much to tell us, argues Yvonne Howell, Professor of Russian and Global Studies at the University of Richmond. She introduces five of their best works: the play that gave us the word ‘robot’, the novel that introduced ‘stalkers’ to the genre, and stories that explore AI and ecological crisis decades before they became pressing concerns.
