(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: main Chrononauts theme)
introductions, non-podcast reads
Greetings, everyone. This is Chrononauts, a science fiction, literature, history podcast. I'm JM, and I'm here with my co-hosts, Nate and Gretchen. And today we're talking about the Karel Čapek classic "War with the Newts".
But before we get into that, I'll just run down some of our things. We are all over the internet now. We have a blog spot, which we would like you to visit. There's a lot of cool material there, and there's more coming up. We're going to have a lot of translated works from Spanish that we'll be discussing in the near future.
Nate:
Yeah, if you like apocalyptic stories where future animals destroy humanity, then you might enjoy the upcoming translation of Alejandro Quesada's "The Little Pigs".
JM:
Yes, and you will be able to find that at chrononotspodcast.blogspot.com. And as well, we are on YouTube at Chrononauts Podcast, and we are also on Apple Podcast and Spotify, and all those good places where you can find all your favorite podcasts. You can contact us on Twitter @ChrononautsSF, or write us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com. And yes, we would like it if you were able to maybe leave a comment for us on your favorite platform, and definitely helps keep discussions going and let us know what people like, what they might not like, and also makes people aware of us as a podcast.
And yeah, we've got some really exciting plans coming up and a good lot of episodes coming out. We just wrapped up our 50th episode last time, I believe, so yeah, here's to the future. And we've got a really interesting book in store for everyone today. But yeah, before we talk about all that, how's everybody been doing? It's getting really cold here all of a sudden, so winter is definitely on the way. And I hope everybody's been cozy and busy and reading and doing other cool stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely. I've been reading a couple cool things. I mentioned last time that I was reading "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And when I mentioned that during the Burroughs episode, I remarked that it shares some of the shortcomings of "Princess of Mars", but that Doyle overall is a much stronger writer. And having finished the novel now, I still agree with those sentiments. The racism there is a bit uncomfortable at times, which is a bit too bad, as otherwise, it's a really good adventure story. And I'm sure we'll be covering other lost worlds at some point in the future, though. I'm not sure if we'll want to do this particular one, but whatever works we'll do for that episode it will definitely be in the background.
JM:
Yeah, it's on the list. It's on the list. But the list is pretty long. So, you know, we'll see. It's something I'd like to, I mean, Conan Doyle does have some more SF stuff that we haven't really talked about. So it would be cool to kind of address some of it at some point. So yeah, that's definitely one of the big ones.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely one of the big novels in the field. Then after that, I returned to "Arabian Nights", the second volume. This one mostly covered a novel length tale, not really in the format of a modern novel, but it had less of the nested unrelated tales that the first volume did. And then after that, I returned to another podcast author, someone who many might consider the greatest American author of the 19th century, though with the titles on the podcast that we've covered previously, this might not narrow that down too much. But this is Mark Twain and his classic nonfiction work, "The Innocents Abroad", which is a travelogue of a voyage he undertook early in his writing career throughout Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa. And yeah, overall, it's really, really funny. I've been to a couple of the places that he's gone to in Europe. So hearing his observations there on what's changed and what hasn't changed in the last 150 years is really fun and really interesting.
JM:
Yeah, that's really cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I haven't read any of the nonfiction that Twain has written. So that's interesting.
Nate:
I think he has another one, another travelogue where he goes up and down the Mississippi.
JM:
Yeah, later. Yeah, I haven't read it, but I remember going through all the biographical material. There was a lot of that stuff. So I can't remember what the later one was called.
Nate:
Yeah, the end of the book, when he's in the Middle East, unfortunately, has a lot of disparaging remarks about Arabic people and colonialist mindset really does come in a bit there, but it's 1860s. So I don't know, maybe not the most progressive time for international global relations. But yeah, that's what I've been up to. Some cool stuff I've been reading. I'm going to go back into volume three of the Arabian Nights now that I've just finished up with "The Innocents Abroad" and definitely have a lot more other stuff in the future.
Gretchen:
I've also done a fair bit of reading, especially during October. I tried to read a bit more horror to get into like the Halloween spirit. But before I did that, I actually read nonfiction work myself. I read "The Dark Renaissance" by Steven Greenblatt, which is a biography of Christopher Marlowe. And that was a really interesting work. I've only read two of Christopher Marlowe's plays so far. I've read "Faustus" and "The Jew of Malta". And I really enjoyed both of those works. But I think that even outside of that Marlowe's an interesting figure, he's like so shrouded in mystery. And there's so much that we kind of don't know about him. And part of the biography is addressing there's so many gaps we have in our knowledge of him and still trying to recreate something that could have happened from what we do know. So it was a really cool work to read.
I also read two works by more modern authors that I've read before. I read "The Unworthy" by Agustina Bazterrica. I've read "Her Tender is the Flesh" before this. And Rivers Solomon's "Model Home". I'd read a sci-fi book, "An Unkindness of Ghosts" by them a few months ago. And I think I may have mentioned it in one of our reading sections during one of our past episodes. But I do say I enjoyed the previous works. I'd read by both of them a little more than I enjoyed the ones I read for the last month. But I still had a good time with them. There was some fun. "The Unworthy" has a bit of a nunsploitation-ish vibe to it, which was interesting. And "Model Home", as you can tell from the title, is kind of a take on the Haunted House. And I love a good Haunted House story.
And after that, I ended up reading the short story collection from Bradbury, "The October Country". And I had read a couple of the stories in that collection before. But a lot of them were new to me. And overall, a really good collection, which I'm a fan of Bradbury's writing. So I wasn't surprised to enjoy the works in that.
After that, I ended up reading a couple of just short stories and several anthologies that I have. And I actually read, for the first time, this is probably one of the most notable works I read. And JM knows that I've been wanting to read this for a while now. But I did read Robert Aickman's "The Hospice". And I read it a few days ago, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. So it's a really good work that is just like really mysterious. There's so much going on in that story that doesn't get explained. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.
But yeah, those are some of the major things I've read recently. It's been a pretty good month or so, reading-wise.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely sounds it. The Marlowe is one I'd like to revisit. I read an anthology or, I guess, a collection, I should say, of his plays a really, really long time ago, but I haven't come back to him since. And I do have to roll my eyes every time the Shakespeare author theory comes up.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do address that a bit, discourage that.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. Right.
JM:
Oh, yeah, that's a really cool set of readings, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah, I read a few things, as well as one of the late 30s, Weird Tales Entries, "The Black Drama" by Manly Wade Wellman, which has to do with the fateful meeting of Lord Byron and the Shelleys and Mr. Polidori on that special evening of the inclement weather when they were all inside writing spooky stories. And, well, we thought that Byron didn't come up with anything much, but apparently he did. And the story, "The Block Drama", is the lost play from Byron. And Manly Wade Wellman wrote a kind of weird supernatural mystery around it, which was pretty fun.
I also read "We've Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson, which was a reread. And I've been reading a lot of her short stories lately in the lottery and other stories. And yeah, it was time to read that one again. And yeah, it's really good. I don't know. It's a pretty short book. And it's one of those she's so ambiguous sometimes where you don't know how to feel when finishing it. Is it a positive ending or not? I don't know. It seems like Mary Kat and her sister are going to be, I guess, happy in their little fortress. So yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting book, obviously very well written and powerful in its way. It's nothing overtly supernatural, but it does kind of have that feeling to it sometimes at certain points.
I also read a couple of crime novels because I got once again into Charles Willeford, and I couldn't really just stop at one. So I looked at some of his Hoke Moseley books, which is sort of where he broke into the mainstream in the 1980s after kind of doing a lot of other stuff for decades, including writing for some pretty, I guess, lowbrow publishing houses and stuff like that that specialized in really sleazy crime fiction and stuff. But there was always something a little more to him, a little more aspiring. And sometimes though, you know, you can sort of see that background in his work because he can be a little bit harsh and very mean spirited at times. But these books, "Miami Blues" and "Sideswipe" were a lot of fun. Actually, they were set in the Miami area in Florida. And you can tell he knows the area very well because there's tons and tons of background and not just geographical details, but the people and the demographics and stuff like that. And yeah, I don't normally like police protagonists type books all that much. But I must say that Hoke is not really your common upstanding heroic policeman at all. And the books were actually very funny at times. I raced through them and really enjoyed them. I know I have to read "The Burnt Orange Heresy" at some point that was made into a movie not that long ago. And I was thinking of watching it after, but I still haven't read the books.
So I also read the autobiography of Marianne Faithfull, because not that long ago, I started getting interested in her actual music and she was always this person that I heard about, scandalous 1960s English woman who everybody in my dad's generation, these seem to know who she was, but not really anything about her besides the fact that she was in some weird cult short films and was Mick Jagger's girlfriend for a while. But there's actually a lot more to her than that. And she's had a hell of a life. And she died quite recently. And I don't know, I guess I don't know what exactly brought it on. I think a friend told me to listen to her album "Strange Weather", which is mostly covers and read on versions of some of her old songs. Basically, after the late 60s, lots of drinking and drug abuse and other things had a big impact on her, her life and also her voice. And I don't know if you guys heard the Metallica song she was on in the late 90s, but I think that was probably the first time I actually heard her sing. And I was kind of like, wow, what kind of voice is that, right? But you know what? It's actually really cool. And if you like voices that have an odd distinctive character to them, Marianne Faithfull's later voice is pretty interesting. And also her writing voice, she was a very intelligent person, very, very outspoken, very blunt about certain things, kind of disillusioning a lot of people's ideas about what it was like in the pop scene of the 1960s, especially. And she's maybe going to rub some people the wrong way, but it was a really interesting read for sure, kind of getting to know more about this person that suddenly started to oddly fascinate me.
So yeah, that's basically what I've been reading since we did the last podcast episode.
(music: Edward German - "In Praise of Neptune" on bright synth)
"War with the Newts" background, non-spoiler discussion
Now it's time to talk about "War with the Newts". And yeah, this was my choice. So I was pretty excited to talk about this book. It's one that I did read previously. There's three different translations that I know of available in English. And I've kind of looked at all three. And yeah, I think we all pretty much read the Weatherall translation this time.
Nate:
Yeah, that's the one I read.
Gretchen:
That was the one I chose to do.
Nate:
And I was looking for comments online just about the translations. And I was surprised that one person on, I don't know if it was Goodreads or Reddit or somewhere was saying that they didn't pick up on any of the humor in the Weatherall translation. And sometimes when I read comments like that, it's like, you know, what, we're even reading the book, I don't know, because I mean...
JM:
Yeah, my friend read it too. And she said the same thing. She didn't think they did until the ending. She didn't really pick up on a lot of the it's funny. I did look at the Osers translation last time. That's what I read. And I kind of went back to that back and forth. The language is certainly a little more casual and contemporary, a little perhaps less formal. And I kind of not sure if the Czech is more like that. But the language in the Osers version is a little more harsh. Some of the Van Toch cursing certainly more harsh. Some of the words that you used, it seems like the older translation from contemporary to Čapek's time, took it a little easy on certain things that I don't know, maybe it's a little stiff. I didn't have a problem with it. I think that it was fine.
Nate:
Yeah, I didn't think it was stiff at all. And the humor really leapt off the page for me, especially in a lot of those beginning sections where we do have a lot of time with the captain Van Toch.
Gretchen:
Yes. Yeah, I read this, there were a number of times when I was reading it like on my way to work, and I would be like at the bus stop reading it. And I would laugh out loud a bit at some of the moments of it. There are definitely pretty good moments of humor in this.
Nate:
It was really witty and clever too, and the way it presents these things. I guess the version of the Weatherall that I read, it teases the book with the one scene where the newt just comes up and starts speaking Czech to a couple of people, which is an amazing scene. It's one of the best scenes in the book.
Gretchen:
It's a great scene. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if we'll talk about that bit later, but that is a scene I also really enjoyed.
JM:
Yeah, so this is available from the Gollancz science fiction masterwork series in a book along with RUR, which we did a couple of years ago now. And I believe that's the Osers translation that he used for that. I could be wrong about that, but no, it's definitely not.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's the Osers because I remember seeing that when I was looking for the Weatherall first. Okay.
JM:
Yeah. All right, cool. Yeah, so there's a few different translations available. If you want to go to Gutenberg, you can read the David Wyllie translation. Apparently he's done some German translations before, but I don't know about his Czech stuff, but supposedly he's known for translating some Kafka works. That translation also seems okay. I didn't look at that one as much, but I looked at that a little bit too, and that wouldn't seem a little bit more in a modern style again. But there's definitely not huge differences between the three. But I guess if you're coming at this from a 2025 perspective, probably go with maybe the Osers because it is a pretty good, fun translation. Perhaps it might be easier to pick up on the humor, I guess. I don't know.
To me, this was a very funny book from the get-go, but yeah, I mean, it also has a very dark message and motif. But I guess before we get into that, I'll just talk a bit about some background for a few minewts, and then we'll talk about what we think of the book overall before we get into the overall picture of what happens.
So this book was published in 1936, and on this book Čapek says, "it was last spring when the world was looking rather bleak economically, and even worse politically. Apropos of I don't know what, I had written the sentence, 'you mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet'. And that was it. That sentence was the reason I wrote War with the Newts. It is quite thinkable," Čapek continues, "that cultural development could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization, not inferior to our own, could arise in the depths of the sea. If some species other than man were to attain that level, we call civilization, what do you think? Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it fight the same wars? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal, other than man, declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world, and hold sway over all of creation? It was this confrontation with human history, and with the most pressing topical history that forced me to sit down and write 'War with the Newts'."
So while the satire in this book is sharp, and there are many targets, there's no simple way to look at this text. And it seems like the Newts are representatives of many different things. Is it fascism, or is it the exploited and abused? What are we to make of this? So I definitely came across some reviews and commentary from people that were very confused by this book, and not really sure what its real targets were. I think I sort of have an answer to that, but we'll see as we talk about it, because I think it's certainly one of the most interesting things about the book is how, I guess, pointed and how sort of was Čapek in hitting his targets. The purpose of the Newts in the narrative definitely keeps mutating, and I'm sure this is on purpose.
Čapek seems to have opposed all extreme ideologies. His biographer Ivan Klima writes, "the thinking of many of Čapek's contemporaries was rooted in uncompromising and aggressive ideologies, which sought to reduce even the most complex problems and conflicts to the simplistic language of slogans. The world was witnessing increasing confrontations between classes, nations and systems, communism and capitalism, bourgeoisie and proletariat, democracy and dictatorship, the black and white ideological thinking which continues to dominate the world. Ostensibly, everything could be grasped and explained in such language. Its chief effect, however, was to obscure the human side of every problem. Conflicts and issues were elevated to an impersonal level governed by power, strength and abstract interests where man was not responsible for his behavior or actions, and even less for the fate of society."
And again, that's Klima's point of view on Čapek, but it seems to hold true and it seems like during his lifetime, sometimes Čapek was criticized for this and not, you know, perhaps being almost too much of a champion of the small man and the provincialism of the small man and stuff like that. And it doesn't seem like he was doing this out of total reactionaryism to me anyway. And when you see this book and all the arguments he has with himself, literally at the end of the book, it's just really interesting. But while we talk about the book, and before I read another quote from Čapek at the end, we should keep in mind about the last chapter of this book. Čapek also wrote that he thought it was a "disgusting" chapter. He didn't like it. Yet it seemed inevitable at the time. So we'll get back to this.
Čapek wanted very similitude in his work. And so in War with the Newts, he was extremely topical, so much so that he parodied and referenced popular nonfiction forms, political and diplomatic conferences, advertising slogans, and real people who are often referenced, more or less directly and rather humorously in the text. So we can recognize a lot of them today, but some may be a little bit lost to time. So we'll try to point out where we see them. And you guys probably got some stuff that I didn't, and maybe vice versa. So again, when we talk about this, I want this to be definitely a bit of a free for all, because that's just the kind of book that this is.
Meanwhile, a little tiny bit of background, it's 1936, and Czechoslovakia is waking up from a period of prosperity to great conflict. Karel Čapek is coming to realize that his international friends, the other great civilized nations of Europe, might be abandoning the fledgling country at its time of need. And the Germans are saying, 'what about the Germans of Czechoslovakia? They have Germans there, what of them? Aren't they being oppressed?'
And in any case, it's worth noting that there was a small domestic SF tradition already. So as well as Čapek are mentioned in the works of Jan Weiss and Josef Nesvadba. I don't know how to pronounce that name, but I've seen his name before. He's actually in an international SF anthology that I have. So I'm interested in checking out his work. It seems like the story that's in the anthology might be rather Verne influenced, but I have to read it for sure. But yeah. Writing her for her early experience, looking back from the 1990s, the aspiring writer in the 70s Eva Hauser said, "this domestic SF was for the most part deeply humanistic, even educational, concentrating on the problems of society, typically how to maintain human values in some kind of alienated or over technologized future. We didn't have anything like the American tradition of individualistic, adventurous SF."
Fandom didn't really seem to take off till a generation or so into the communist rule. And no official new magazines were allowed to be published during that time. But it seems there was a fandom, though, and short story anthologies were published. And not related to our topic today. But in the early 80s was the Karel Čapek annual short story award contest. And this afforded beginning writers with little chance of official publication, the chance to have their work judged by a jury of their peers. The prize, a statue of a small black newt. And Eva Hauer got her newt in 1988. So, Nate, did you have any, you found some other references to authors from around that time that might be worth mentioning?
Nate:
Yeah. So you mentioned Jan Wies, which is probably the most accessible for English as his novel, "House of a Thousand Floors" from 1929 has been translated into English. And I just want to read the Amazon description here. So it says, "'House of a Thousand Floors' is one of the earliest science fiction novels in European literature first published in 1929. Besides being a pioneered genre, the book is highly regarded for its general merits as psychological literature. The novel tells a story of a dream in fever of a soldier wounded in World War One. He finds himself in the stairway of a gigantic and Kafkaesque tower like building, which is a metaphor for human society." And it just kind of goes on to describe this surreal tower. So it definitely sounds a bit like a darker Gormenghast type scenario. But yeah, it looked like Weiss wrote a couple other novels and short stories, which are also like fantastica related, but they don't appear to be translated into English.
Likewise, an author, Jiří Haussmann wrote a couple of utopian novels and a lot of the references for stuff during this time and a little bit before are indeed those utopia dystopia kind of social type of science fiction novels where you get a tour of some society and it's used as a vehicle to criticize the socialist or advocate for the socialist or something like that. Of all these authors, well, maybe there's another one, a J.M. Troska, who did a long running series of juvenile, what sound like Jules Verne inspired titles, but again, they haven't been translated into English. But of all this stuff that I've seen listed in the pre-1945 science fiction, Čapek definitely seems to be the most science fiction and definitely the most accessible in the English language.
JM:
And besides "RUR" and "Newts", there are a couple other works too that he did write that probably qualify in the genre, but most of his novels were probably not. But yeah, there was the other one was "Krakatit" and "The Absolute at Large", definitely.
Gretchen:
I actually have heard that in "The Absolute at Large", there is a character that is in "War with the Newts".
JM:
Right. Yeah. I don't know. This work, to me, "RUR" was like very similar to this in some ways. So you can tell that he's kind of still thinking about some of the same things. And "RUR" is a play, so I mean, different medium. Only time, well, actually no, there were a few little Russian ones we did too, but pretty much the only time we really did a play on Chrononauts so far. And that was really cool. But this is definitely, there's a lot more in this. And I've kind of told somebody that I was reading this book and she said, Oh, the robots guy, right? That's what he's known for in the English speaking world at least. And yeah, there's probably should be more. I mean, as well as this, there's a lot of his short stories, which I'd started to read when we were doing "RUR" just to get a feeling for some of the other stuff that he did. And I really enjoy "The Tales from Two Pockets" and short, powerful stories, sometimes, sometimes quite satirical, really fun to read.
Also got some like, I don't know if you can call them essays, but it's more like, you know, little thought pieces that he did, like there's one where he's kind of imagining his cat looking at him while he's trying to write and the cat trying to figure out what he's doing and why he's sitting there writing and like, all the thoughts that are going through his cat's head. There's another one where he talks about a new vacuum cleaner that he got that he was like, talking about the vacuum cleaner and this machine and what it's for. And it's kind of interesting that, you know, he's kind of always seems to be imagining things and personifying things, right? Here he is thinking about intelligent newts, right? Which is a kind of a funny concept. But at the same time, he does it really well.
And it sounds like we all kind of got some good, good stuff from this book, right? Yeah, so.
Nate:
Yeah, I definitely really liked it. Probably more than "R.U.R.", I would say, though I really liked "R.U.R." too. But yeah, there's definitely a lot more in this. He hits the, I guess when you really think about it is the basic same ideas, but just on a much broader and deeper level, I think, and he experiments a lot more with style, especially in the middle section where it's just all these epistolary documents.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I also agree that like, I really did enjoy "R.U.R." as well. I like the more global scale of "War with the Newts". And I like that there is a larger variety here. And it feels very much like a worldwide phenomenon. Like he's really portraying that very well.
JM:
I suppose a person could argue, if they're expecting a "regular" novel, that there's no real characters to focus on. There's not much of following one character through the duration of the thing or one group of characters. But, you know, I think that's okay. I think not all novels need to be like that. So this one, yeah, it does a great job of trying to encompass a lot in a fairly short page count. And I think, you know, the book is extremely fast paced. Like, there's never a break, never a dull moment. And when you're looking at the newspaper stuff, all this information is coming to you really fast. Like, you're having to try and put it all together, right, into some kind of picture. And yeah, I mean, in a way, a part of me missed the fun friendliness of the early parts of the book. I wanted to have more adventures with Captain Van Toch and stuff like that. But at the same time, it felt like the moving on of history, right? It was like, oh, we lost touch with that person. Certainly, things kind of expand to the point where we're not really focusing on individuals anymore. And but it works for me. A part of me was like, oh, this newspaper stuff is a bit dry. But at the same time, I'm like, but you know what, he's really bringing it to life with all the notes and stuff like that, which we'll get to when we talk about that part. But that's almost like more a story within the story kind of thing. And the notes tell their own story, which is often more detailed than what's in the articles, right? Well, excerpted articles.
Then we get to the war with the newts, which happens really fast. The last book is the shortest one. All this happened so fast. It's like, it feels like inevitable. It feels like that's the way it would happen. And he kind of comments on that at the end, where he says, it's not going to be some kind of cosmic catastrophe. It's just, you know, it's, it feels like maybe that's how, that's how it felt for him looking at the world situation. And yeah, I mean, within two years of writing this, Čapek was dead. And his brother ended up in a concentration camp and died there. You feel this time is not just marching, but it's racing and he's doing everything he can to possibly keep up. And it's a struggle, right? So it's powerfully like he distances himself from it by creating this global panorama of events. But at the same time, you feel the desperation and the frustration in it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
That he was probably feeling and that he's kind of masking with humor and satire and doing a pretty good job of that.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know if it was just because I was reading "The Innocents Abroad" at the same time I was reading this, but I really read a couple of the scientific reports, especially in Mark Twain's voice. It just fits really, really well. But yeah, I mean, he bounces and alternates between that. There's definitely a lot of Wellesian style social commentary in here, as well as the more weird fiction, strange sea adventures like the Visiak and all those other novels that we covered a while ago. He really does strike a good balance between all these different kinds of tones and have them add up to be a much bigger, more interesting picture.
JM:
Yeah. I'm really happy everybody had a good time with this. All that being said, why don't we take a short break and then we'll get into talking about what happens and everybody can just cut in with their thoughts and feelings as we go because there's a lot. And the best way to talk about it is probably just to describe it. So it's not going to be a normal summary in the general sense that we sometimes do, except maybe for the first part. But yeah, let's have some polkas, shall we?
(music: Miss A. C. B. - "Sea Nymph Polka" (1855) on brassy synth)
spoiler summary and discussion
The book has a lot of fun little character sketches, but not really any central character, although we do return periodically to Mr. Povondra, who is kind of the anchor, no pun intended, on which the thing rests, although maybe not as much as he thinks, as he believes the whole thing is his doing and or his fault, depending on where we're at. That is, it's pretty adorable, but our first character, though, is this drunken oaf of a Sea Captain, Van Toch, a Czech/Dutchman working in the Pacific Islands, and ostensibly, he's trying to get palm oil and other sundry goods, but in actuality, his bosses want him to bring back pearls. Lots of them, despite the fact that he curses and grumbles that they're totally useless. He has these two Sri Lankan fellows on board, whose job it is to dive for them.
However, they say the bay at Tana Masa, somewhere near Sumatra, is cursed with devils, and they won't go there even though there's apparently a lot to be found. And he's a funny character, this Van Toch, lots of racial prejudices, perpetually drunk, bad tempered, but in the Čapek tradition, also weirdly endearing, and he knows if there really are any devils, they would look like Europeans, and they would be French, most likely, and there probably aren't any of those in the Dutch colonies.
So he insists talking in Malay to people who can't understand it, and so this Cuban Portuguese character is translating for him, and he goes to Devil Bay, and it's there he gets introduced to the sea devils, or giant newts, or tapas, and they're not in fact Batak islanders, but big salamanders, and they're not really giants, they're sort of childlike, often described as such in the text. And as the custom guys tell them, they have hands, and they have no trouble diving for pearls, and they like to eat what's in the oyster shells too, and not only do they learn, but they already make good dams, "perfect breakwaters", according to Van Toch, and they need protection from the sharks.
The captain calls them to him like kittens, and well, they'd say they don't hand them out of fish, but teach them how to catch them, and that's kind of what Van Toch does, by giving them knives, a harpoon, and other things which they can use. Labor-saving devices, all kinds, including wheel barrels and hoists, and lots of them live down there, and they pretty much have their own town, and they stick to the area, and it's really obvious that Van Toch is quite delighted by these creatures, and you get the idea he likes his lizards more than he likes people, and they can sure get a lot of pearls if he keeps visiting and bringing them some cool stuff.
He thinks of them as children, and at the moment, he's not far off, so Van Toch's got some plans now, and he takes a year's leave so he can set up his own thing, and we get some scene with a couple of newspaper boys trying and failing miserably to interview Van Toch later in his actual native town in Czechoslovakia, and the Osers translation uses the phrase "the silly season", which I love and learned from C.M. Kornbluth's story, "The Silly Season", about reporters trying to navigate the fact that it's the worst time of year when everybody's reporting a whole lot of bullshit, and meanwhile there's an alien invasion about to happen, and they don't even realize it, and it's the silly season, so nobody takes it seriously until it's too late. But yeah, I guess I don't know if people still use that phrase, but certainly in the 30s and 40s it seems like the silly season was a thing, so I don't know what the equivalent would be nowadays on our modern digital landscape, but yeah.
So that's why these two unhappy reporters find our guy Van Toch in a tavern somewhere and try to get the goods. I just love how Čapek sets up the need to interview this sea captain because there's literally no news, and these guys are trying to think of things to do, and they're like, well, why don't we invent a new vitamin or something like that, and there's this weird little conversation. Everything is so personalized in this, even when he's dealing with these like, world-shaking events, and it's like, you can't get around the fact that what makes this book tick is actually still human interaction and conversations and stuff like that, even though it's kind of scattered and it's hard to focus on any one thing, and just summarizing this doesn't even come close to approximating what it's actually like to read it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, it's like even though, as we've said, and we'll get into it, there's not really like main characters, there's still all these little vignettes that are just really fun to read.
JM:
Exactly, yeah. So, Van Toch gets pretty insulted when they ask him if he's been shipwrecked, and do you think I'm a bad sailor or what? And he wants to know if they've got money. Uh-oh, maybe he'll get some from the papers if he's lucky. Nah, that's not nearly enough. He's already got a wad of cash, but he needs more. Financing for, well, he's got pearls, but the reporter boys have their share of lunatics and won't bite. Go see Mr. Bondy, they say, a captain of industry. They need to buy a ship. Mr. Bondy lives in Prague now, but Van Toch actually remembers him. Actually, he and his friends used to bully him for being Jewish, but now they can all be friends, right? And Go see Bondy, named perhaps after the character in the Jeeves books from PG Wodehouse. Van Toch drinks lots of beer. I don't think Bondy drinks any, but Van Toch's like, could you bring us four gallons of beer? And Povondra's like, you want me to bring you beer? What's going on here?
So, he tells Bondy his story, and this is also where we meet Mr. Povondra, and he's the doorman, and he's a worrying sort of fellow, and he spends the entire rest of the book thinking the world basically rests on his shoulders because of what happens with the newts, and Bondy is really taken by the romanticism and adventure of the story, and he gets pretty emotional about it, and Van Toch's got thousands of pearls, which he just casually drops everywhere, and yeah, he's been pretty busy. He's totally unmoved by the pearls, but just thinks, oh, it's impressive how many sharks the tapa boys killed, and of course the tapa boys are what he calls the newts, and the problem is, well, there aren't any more pearls in Devil Bay, and there aren't any tapa boys anywhere else, so we'll be losing touch with Captain Van Toch pretty soon, sadly, but Bondy has the right idea.
Bondy is maybe the closest thing the book has to a villain, but he's really not at all. Is he? I mean, he's just like having this dream, and it's funny, you know, he's like, he could have been portrayed as this like really evil capitalist. Just like everybody else in this book, he just seems to be doing what he thinks is expedient, and he's like one of these people who sees an opportunity and just grabs it when he can. He doesn't think about the future consequences, although it seems like he has somewhat of an idea when his fellows don't, but he takes it in the wrong direction, which we'll see in a moment, but yeah, he's not at all a villainous character, and he's like the arch-capitalist who basically sets off all this terrible situation.
But the tapa boys of Van Toch's have already multiplied quite a lot, and Van Toch knows that to ship them to other islands and bays is the way to go, so putting the tanks and the shipping will take care of them, and they'll eat a lot of stuff too, and he doesn't team to see Van Toch the basis for exploitation. He just likes them and wants to take care of them, and he finds them endlessly charming. Bondy doesn't quite believe, but he will soon enough, so the emotion of it all is kind of sweet for the moment.
But time passes by, and Van Toch's been going everywhere with his lizard newt friends, and they're not always popular with the seamen. There's an Irishman called Dingle, and he kicks a newt to death, and Van Toch is very displeased, and later he meets the Swede who is on the original expedition with Van Toch, and they have a funny conversation about whether they should hold a mass for Van Toch and whether it should be in an Irish church or not, and so the Irishman gets an IOU, so he'll remember that the Swede gave him some money so that he could hold this nice mass for Van Toch, and of course the Irishman who doesn't understand what the hell he's just done just spends it all on booze, and there's never a mass held for Mr. Van Toch, so God does not intercede, sadly.
But yeah, Van Toch is taught them to speak and more, and he spends a lot of time with them, and lets them out into the water, and doesn't tell anyone what's in the packages he sends back to Europe, but we know, of course. So now starts a set of anecdotes and observations about the newts that continues through most of the book, and we have a movie starlet and her entourage on board this yacht called the Gloria Pickford, and she seems like she wants to be in King Kong or maybe a girl Caruso kind of character, and yeah, I mean, all these people are really annoying, like on purpose.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
I thought the scene was a lot of fun because of that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's like very like the most stereotypically like vapid Hollywood actress and actor actresses.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. And I love like the whole time they're doing this, they're thinking about like their film and what's going to happen and whether they're going to name it and what are the crazy newspaper headline publicity things going to look like, and like, and meanwhile, you know, there's this kind of this love square thing going on there with the yeah. It's just, it's funny and kind of stupid on purpose, but it like it doesn't take up very much of the book, so it's fine. I like enjoyed it.
But they decide they might show the documentary or something instead of an adventure film, and a bunch of them, yeah, they come up with all these silly names for the movie and stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah, of course, it doesn't end up being a documentary anyways, it's just another like vehicle for the starlet to be like kind of, like you said, like a King Kong sort of situation anyways.
JM:
Yeah, he's like, oh, it can be an educational nature film, I get to lie naked over here, and then these tritons will fall in love with me.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and I'll be taken to their king, and they'll want me to live underwater with them.
JM:
Yeah, this is the first time the newts referred to as tritons as well. We're gonna see that a bit, as well as the Triton trot and lots of glorious pieces of dance music made in commemoration of the newts sensation.
So most of these anecdotes are just meant to be silly, but it illustrates how the newts are spreading around. And there are some eerie elements to the encounter, as the newts are strange when people first see them, and they kind of dance around parroting people at first, and then start yelling for knives. And that sounds a little bit threatening, I guess, so, but they just want to trade stuff. And we get the first instance later also of a new lullone dying in captivity. Certainly a pattern that seems to recur throughout the book.
Yeah, the poor thing goes in a bathtub, and within two days it's dead, so.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the pet of the starlet that we see. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So the movie does get made, though, at least it sounds like a big glorious spectacle. And the only captive newt was dead after two days, and the Lily Valley/Lily sweetie pie tritons become part of legendary. And meanwhile, scientists argue about how to classify these things, which may or may not be a hoax. And there's an article in National Geographic after the Tin Food King, J.S. Tinker finances an expedition for some reason, because, yeah, I guess it gets named in the paper again, right? It's been too long.
So the experts are pretty incongruous. The name Andrias Scheuchzeri is chosen for the Newts, more or less, but the nations fight over each other's Newts and what to do with and how to classify them. And certainly is that's a sign of things to come. And when the Tinker expedition finds some newts and the newts get too close, the first thing they do is open fire on them. So that's good. Pay no attention to that new writhing on the ground that keeps screaming something like, oh, God, oh, God.
Yeah, Čapek was inspired by an actual recorded historical thing that happened in the early 18th century, I think, where this Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer found this salamander skeleton somewhere in Germany, and he mistook it for perhaps a folded up child or something like that. And his theory was that he had found a relic of humanity from before the flood. Čapek mentions this in the book, but he doesn't really go into the detail of how that happened. But it's pretty cool that that's actually a thing. And later on, some Dutchman who was working for Napoleon got the skeleton out of a museum and figured out that, oh, this is actually some kind of weird salamander that's extinct now, right? And it's not. But it's interesting at the time that, yeah, Scheuchzer, who these things are now named after, mistook this creature for a human skeleton.
So meanwhile, at the London Zoo, they managed to get one in captivity. And this new seems quite ordinary at first until the night custodian hears it speaking. And yeah, he's surprised at this at first, but he soon decides to help on along. It's clear that, although parroting might be mostly what's happening at first, the newt isn't really just doing that. And he chooses them to read, and the newt, nicknamed Andrew Scheuchzer, or Andy, learns everything he knows from the newspapers, which he reads to custodian Gregs as he sweeps up the reptile house.
Andy talks like a proper, somewhat confused, perhaps British citizen. By the time some officials discover he's been in their midst for quite some time. And some scientists try to get to the bottom of Andy, and it's all a bit unfortunate. They still think he's just parroting and seem to mock him for not having seen a horse or knowing more English rivers, which, yeah, well, of course he wouldn't. And they won't let Andy ask any questions. It's like a police interrogation. And the summary report they gave after the interview is ridiculous, like, oh, there's no reason to overrate its intelligence, because it's in no way exceeding that of the average person of our time. But okay, then, you're talking to an intelligent newt. But that's fucking incredible.
Gretchen:
It's a newt that has the intelligence of the common man, so it's nothing special.
JM:
Yeah, it's like, oh, it's nothing. It can't actually do long division in its head, therefore...
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do really like the transcript of the interview, because there are just moments where it'll just start saying ads in the middle of the answers that it's giving, which is just very fun. It's like, I really like the way that it shows. That is very much what you would just find in a newspaper, is all these ads of like, the British is better. Use this if you're in Britain.
Nate:
I believe one of the people during this segment, I don't know if it's from the report or not, I'll have to take a look in the text afterwards. But their name, Sir Oliver Dodge, which I thought was a nice nod to Oliver Lodge, who we've mentioned a couple times on the podcast before.
JM:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, it definitely seemed that way. Yeah. And you probably expect that would happen too. But sadly, Andy too doesn't survive the hardships of human attention. And he gets a lot of that and a lot of sweet treats and eventually becomes very ill and dies. Too much candy. Too much candy.
Nate:
It's like why you shouldn't feed your dog chocolate.
JM:
Right. Nowadays at the zoo, the people generally know not to do that sort of thing. But I don't know, you would think anyway. Yeah. But we get a glimpse of Povondra again, who has an eight-year-old son who he takes to the fair. And I don't know, I didn't really get this because in the commentaries I read about the translations, it said that the Weatherall actually anglicized some of the names, whereas the newer translations didn't. But in the Osers translation, they make the kid's name Frankie, whereas in the weatherall, it's Frantek or something, right? That sounds a lot more Czech. So I don't know if somebody got confused about that or what, but I didn't really notice much anglicization in the Weatherall at all, actually.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, they discuss the town of Jevíčko, which is a pretty Czech name. And all the places are retained their native names in that language, as he certainly goes far beyond Czechoslovakia at that point.
Gretchen:
But I have heard that Osers did do a little bit more either anglifying the names, but also I think there's like this one part where they're talking about the Batak people, and he like makes it like Batvian or something instead.
Nate:
Oh, Batavian, yeah.
Gretchen:
Batavian, that's it. So it's very, it does seem like that's not really something in the Weatherall. The Weatherall seems a little more faithful to stuff like that.
JM:
Yeah, it's interesting doing some a little bit of comparing at least because we have all these to go on, right? So we don't have to all read the text in the same way. But yeah, I mean, for the most part, I think they're sticking pretty close together. But yeah, but do a surprise Povondra meets someone who claims to be Van Toch, much diminished, and he has a poor trained newt in a tank, a "poisonous lizard from the Australian islands". And it's clearly not the real Van Toch, but an imposter. And yeah, we lost Van Toch in the narrative, but we later find out you just died at sea somewhere.
Gretchen:
It should be said that the way that he convinces people that he's Van Toch is that he has an anchor tattoo like that. Like it's just like, yeah, I'm I'm Van Toch. See, I have the traditional sailor tattoo. So obviously.
JM:
He's like, see, I have a tattoo to prove it. I'm that guy. Captain Van Toch. He took the tattoo of an anchor, which but yeah, yeah, Van Toch has obviously become a bit of a legend in his own right.
But yeah, there's speculation about the new place in evolution. And maybe they've been around a lot longer than we think. And they existed in isolated bays and islands. And due to circumstances, we're not able to multiply much. But all that's changing now. And we didn't lose touch with Mr. Bondy. Mr. Bondy is ready for a new page to be turned. The Salamander Syndicate is formed out of his Pacific Export Company, which is called Pacific Export Association in the weather all, which I like because it's Pea and I'm 12 as everybody knows. So I don't know.
But they're in the business of procuring and selling pearls. But he knows these days are numbered. And that there's no way to be able to deal with the increasing new population. And its solution? Sell new labor instead. And that's right. He basically wants to start the slave trade. And it's all done in a very businesslike and efficient civilized way. And there's all sorts of things that newts can do that are difficult for humans. And there can be a whole industry in new goods, money for everyone in the association. And there's lots of hype about changing the continents forever and forming the new Atlantis. All sorts of ideas on how the capitalists can keep their monopoly, including selling only male newt labor or castrating or sterilizing newts and more. And agreements are reached.
Bondy is relieved that the Tapa Boys now have some definite value and will be quote decently treated. The other guys don't even know what the Tapa Boys are. And they don't even know what it really looks like.
Then we get the inserted appendix, the sex lives of the newts. And it's like it's written by a completely different person. There's a lot of anthropomorphizing. And I don't know, I don't think this is like one of his serious targets. And maybe he doesn't feel that strongly about this. But did anyone think that he was, I don't know, maybe, I mean, it may be a little bit ahead of that time. But did you think he was maybe making a bit of a gentle parody of feminism? I just thought like how he was just describing. So the person that made all these observations, I forget what her name is. She's talking about how the male newts basically don't do anything. And it's all this like pointless ritual and stuff like that. And the female newts, I mean, it's just like, I don't know, the way it's phrased just kind of made me think of a certain like mindset where it's like, oh, well, we don't really need men, right? It's like, very aggressive about it, right? You know what I mean? And it's like, maybe literally, that's true. But it's just, it was a little bit like, okay, you know, that's maybe that's where he's going with this. I'm not really sure, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, I don't I feel like maybe like that combined with then there's the other writer about like the sexual reproduction of the newts. That's like, well, you see the men are the ones that are out there, the social ones and like women don't do anything. I feel like it's just to me sort of showing the way that humans are sort of imposing and projecting their anxieties about the social world and like even like using like gender roles.
JM:
I guess you're right. There's a lot of that in this book. Yeah, the newts in general, right?
Gretchen:
So I think that's really one of the big things that Čapek is doing in this is everything that we know that we're learning about the newts, especially in the appendix. A lot of it is just like human beings projecting their own ideas, their own anxieties about humans onto newts.
Nate:
And he shoves pretty much all of that into the entire novel.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Pretty much every social movement and line of political thought is criticized and satirized here and right now we have the capitalist British East India Company and the Atlantic slave trade with this part. But yeah, it's really impressive how he seems to encompass almost all of human history and human political thought in this book of using the newts as a parallel for the development of humanity rising up from the ocean and then eventually having technology transferred to them through this exploitative scene.
Gretchen:
Yeah, we can get into this a little bit more later about like some of the maybe main things that the newts are supposed to represent or like what Čapek is saying because there's definitely some major interpretations of what the newts are doing here. But I feel like overall, the newts are just a way for characters to just project anything onto them. This is the novel's device of showing the whole of society and what worries them and what concerns them. Yeah, that I think that that's really interesting how Čapek has done it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, I guess some of the confusion that seems to be felt with this book again is like, there's a flip partway through, right? Where it's like, you know, you feel really, really sorry for the newts that that all of a sudden like, oh, you know, but wait, they're killing everybody, right? This is like, and that's an obvious Nazi parallel that he's drawing here and so on. But again, I think like the newts definitely represent a lot of different things. And so does humanity, right? The newts are picking up all these. I mean, maybe they do have their own culture under there. Maybe they have their own stuff that we don't that the characters in this book don't even really know about, don't even seem to mostly really want to know about. But they picked up a lot of habits and a lot of ideas from humans. And so, you know, like a newt, or newts in general, I guess can be one of many things. So to saying like, Oh, he's aiming at this one target the whole time. I mean, yeah, he's really trying to take into account everything.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I first reading it, like you said, JM, there is this flip where it's first, you're kind of thinking like the newts are more representative of colonized peoples, people that are like suffering under colonialism, just like the fact that there is the comparison to the Atlantic slave trade with the newt trade, and the location that they're first found the way that they're compared to the natives of Sri Lanka and that region. And then you get at the very end, it does seem like the newts are fascists that they're the Nazis. But I think that it's like the fact that Čapek starts with that they're the colonized to their fascist is almost like showing the broad range of what the newts are supposed to resemble.
Nate:
And I guess we'll get a little bit more when we get there. But when they do turn to that fascist bent, it's almost it's like one particular strain of newts that picks up on this strain that all of newtkind isn't exactly like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. You mean the German newts?
But yeah, I mean, you know, the newts, they basically dance around and the male newts, that is, they don't do much. And they act like men everywhere, I suppose. Yeah, it's the sexual milieu that impregnates newts, the sexual milieu, any kind of sex.
After that, we actually start the second book. And this is the part called "Up the Ladder" or "Up the Steps of Civilization", depending on which translation you use. And this is all a series of sort of randomly assorted newspaper clippings and accompanying notes that describe the growing sensation of the newts. And we have all sorts of anecdotes here. And yeah, we can't really go through them all, but we can certainly give some highlights. And one thing is that the clippings are ostensibly collected by Mr. Povondra, who has become something of a self-appointed newt expert. And there's bits of his collection that have survived into the newt age, whatever that is, preserved for posterity. And we have stuff from all over the world. And showing how the newts are in no particular sequence, exploited, fetishized, used as scapegoats, educated, vivisected, and in other ways experimented on, ghettoized, and in some weird way, despite the newt sensation ignored as intelligent people.
This all the while, where they're clearly achieving very much. There are newt scientists and newt mathematicians. But humans are again quick to point out that, well, I mean, they are any better than your average human scientist or mathematician. So what's the big deal? John Rieder in his essay on "War With the Newts" in the book, "Uneven Futures", to thank for helping get some of this in some sort of order. But there's a nice list of different things that come up in this section. And I guess the first one I'll mention is the newt market report, which indicates a million newts have been sold in the previous month, employed in titanic projects worldwide, such as widening the Panama Canal and dredging the tourist streets.
We also have a story about a bunch of passengers on a sea liner being drowned and newt heroism in coming to rescue them. Some of the local Madrasi are quite upset that the newts should have been allowed to touch drowning persons of higher castes. There's a series of reports that basically the newt slave trade, the S trade. And if the slave trade in the past had been as well organized, and as hygienically practiced as the present newt trade, the slaves could have been congratulated. So there's also an article that looks like it comes from a paper with a very different political demographic, which is a follow up to that, which talks about mass abductions in which on average between 25 and 30% of the captured newts survive. So that's great.
There's all kinds of reports on projects that the newts are working on, like the greater Italy project, which would take up virtually the entire Mediterranean. And new islands that Japan is making and Germany are making, the world's first aircraft island built by the United States, which has "a giant hotel, a sports stadium, a fun park, and a cinema seating 5000".
Nate:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting. He was talking about island creation projects here. I was recently in the Netherlands and I went to his show in a city, maybe about half an hour outside of Amsterdam. And that's what they did there. They just created an island out of the sea.
JM:
Oh, so shortly after this, after this?
Nate:
Yes, as all of the land, Wikipedia says this anyway, almost all the land belonging to Flevoland, which is the province in the Netherlands was reclaimed in the 1950s and the 1960s. It would have been after this book was written when the project was completed. But I believe the project, it says it started in the 1930s. So the idea was floating around, I guess. And I do wonder if Čapek had been made aware of that project and was thinking about that when he wrote these scenes into the book.
JM:
Interesting. Well, they didn't have any newts to help.
Nate:
No, they definitely didn't.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, so there's also a piece on the first scientific Congress about the newts, which is essentially a bunch of, I guess, biologists and other medical practitioners who report on a series of experiments, basically determining how much the newts feel pain and how much they can withstand and how little food or water can you give them before they suffer or die. And yeah, there's a pretty, pretty brutal descriptions of very casual torture in the name of science conducted against the newts.
And this one I thought was funny. There's a magazine piece called "Do Newts Have Souls". And it's got witty answers by people who are around at that time, like George Bernard Shaw and Toscanini and Mae West.
Gretchen:
Yes, I was about to say that the Shaw and the Mae West ones are very good. Yeah, George Bernard Shaw says "they certainly haven't got a soul and this they agree with man". And Mae West said "they have no sex appeal and therefore they have no soul".
JM:
And Toscanini definitely thought they didn't have any souls.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. "I never have seen a newt, but I am convinced the creatures who have no music have no soul".
JM:
Right, obviously. Yeah.
So there's a bunch of initiatives to create a universal language to accommodate the worldwide spread of the newt population. But nobody can agree on what language to use. There's a different one in champion everywhere. And some fringe groups suggest Esperanto, but they don't seem to really belong anywhere.
Gretchen:
And some would suggest sort of an Esperanto but for newts as well.
Nate:
Yeah, I do like how much Esperanto comes up and the science fiction works from around this time.
JM:
It does come up a lot, doesn't it? Well, I mean, it's not really surprising, right? Because I think for a while there, it wasn't uncommon to hear people say things like if we didn't all speak different languages, we'd probably be able to get along better, right? I don't think that's really true.
Nate:
No, not at all.
JM:
It seems like.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, look how well we get along in America. We all speak English for the most part.
JM:
And we all speak the same language, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's the International League for the Protection of Salamanders, which doesn't seem to do much good, but they ensure that work newt camps and everything, all the housings, nice big wooden fences around everything to protect the newts against all kinds of molestation. But it's mostly to make sure that there's a proper segregated environment for the newts to be in. And that's important. So now we get the infamous reports in the US papers about females who claim to have been raped by newts while bathing. And yeah, I mean, a little bit of a serious flashback there. But also, I think Čapek was probably thinking of the same kind of incidents that were mentioned in W.E.B. Du Bois biography about the lynching of black American men on false pretenses. And there's even some mention of the African American community stepping up and being like, yeah, that's not a good idea. We should not lynch newts. That's not good, right?
Nate:
Very "Birth of a Nation". And I mean, it's kind of hard to believe in 2025 what a huge film that was and how it was like everywhere for a while, considering not only the subject matter, but the fact that it's like four hours long. It just almost seems unthinkable. But it was. And that's pretty much exactly what the deal with that movie is.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So it seemed like there was some sensational copycat kind of material that became what blew up in people's mostly, I guess, rural white people. The sensibilities were seriously offended or something. I don't know. Yeah, it is pretty hard to imagine.
But yeah, there's also a communist manifesto addressed to the newts. And unfortunately, you can't make a hell of a lot of sense of it because the censors gone to town scratching black marks over all kinds of stuff. But it seems to be irrelevant to stir up the new proletariat and stuff like that. And yeah, there's a summary of opposing views that take shape regarding the newt problem. And there's the newts are the new working class. And there's also the new sort of dangerous competition to the human workforce. And there's also all these different pamphlets from different people with different organizations with fun titles like newt's friends and friends newts and Oh, brother, newts.
The German one says newts throw out the Jews. And yeah, that's definitely a theme going through this. You definitely see the shadow of that. Whenever Germany is referred to, there's definitely that whiff of fascism in the air.
Gretchen:
So yeah, on a light note, the last one is "colleagues newt from a swimming team", which is pretty fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was. And yeah, there's the, there's the important stuff that happens though, outside of that, like the first scientific paper written by a newt, which goes virtually unnoticed. He contributed into the human world because why not? There are some nice interactions too. There's a French school teacher who hangs out with her newt pupils in water, presumably naked, but it's seen as rather scandalous. She gets proper mad for it, but they do seem to enjoy her company.
Yeah, there's also the fun and sweet interaction between an old Czech couple and a newt who speaks Czech. Yes, he got it from a teacher self Czech for newts book. And the couple was just really happy that someone so far away can speak Czech and they invite him to Czechoslovakia and the newt who calls himself Boleslav Jablonsky or something. He, he says, no, sadly, it's only rivers there. The waters would probably be poisonous for me. So I can't come to Czechoslovakia, but I'm glad your country is exactly like I read about it in my book. That's really awesome.
Nate:
Yeah, there's this really great thing he says where he says, "may lamentations rise to God so that many excellent monuments perished in the Thirty Years' War. If I am not mistaken, the Czech land was then turned into a desert soaked with blood and tears. What good fortune it was that the negative genitive did not disappear." The negative genitive is definitely a grammatical quirk that is, takes a while to get used to in pretty much every Slavic language. It's present in Russian and it's present in Czech here.
Gretchen:
Yes, I also do love that this newt wants to confirm that they did suffer a lot through a period of their history and the Czech couple is like, yes, we suffered greatly during that period. He's like, that's good. I'm glad the book is accurate. That's great to hear.
JM:
It's really funny. Yeah, it's so crazy that in the midst of all this darkness, he's able to make you laugh quite a lot.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
But there's a summary stating that there's now seven billion newts and they have, "joined the ranks of the enlightened nations." And it kind of ends like this. "With this international instrument", this is in a newspaper called Le Temps, "the future of the newts and the peaceful development of mankind are assured for many decades to come. Now, we congratulate the London Conference on the successful conclusion of its difficult consultations. We also congratulate the newts on having been placed with the statute adopted under the protection of the International Court at the Hague. They can now calmly and confidently devote themselves to their work and their submarine progress. Let us emphasize again that the depoliticization of the newts problem as achieved at the London Conference is one of the most important guarantees of world peace. In particular, the disarmament of the salamanders diminishes the likelihood of submarine clashes between individual states. It is a fact that even though numerous frontiers and power disputes continue on nearly every continent, world peace is not actually threatened, at least from the maritime side. But even on dry land, peace would now seem to be more solidly safeguarded than ever before. The maritime states are fully engaged in constructing new coastlines and are able to extend their territories into the world ocean instead of attempting to rectify their land frontiers. No longer will it be necessary to fight with iron and gas for every inch of ground. The newts simple pickaxes and spades will enable every state to build as much territory as it needs. And it is this peaceful newt work for the peace and prosperity of all nations that the London Conference has guaranteed. Never before has the world been closer to perpetual peace and to tranquil the glorious flowering that at this moment, instead of the newt problem of which we have heard and read so much, we shall and rightly speak of a golden newt age."
And yeah, that's the end of book two except for a final chapter around Mr. Povondra. So what do you guys think of the, I'm just gonna get up for a second and get me a drink, but while I'm doing that, what do you guys think of the structure of this part with the notes and everything? Because I thought it was kind of interesting the way he handled that. The notes kind of really tell their own narrative and an arguably more poignant way than the articles that they're supposed to be referring to.
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, first of all, in general, I am a big fan of when any piece of fiction just has footnotes. I just really like footnotes and things. I especially even like when we were reading "Languages of Pao", there's not many, but there's a couple at the beginning. And I just really like it. Maybe that's just the academic in me. I do like a good footnote. But I really enjoy that in "War with the Newts", particularly, I enjoy that the main body of the section of the book is almost trying to maintain like an impartial stance on what is being said or what is being commented on. And I think that then we get the footnotes that we can see like the actual more partial, maybe more human and more emotional side of what is being described.
Nate:
Yeah, the footnotes I think are really interesting because at many times, during the chapter, the footnotes take up a larger proportion of the page than the actual like text of the documents that we're reading. So yeah, it's kind of the one piece of glue that holds the chapter together, in a sense. It really reminded me of one of the chapters from "Finnegan's Wake" where Joyce has like competing notes in the margins of the side in addition to the text and the footnotes. So you get this kind of like four way dialogue with one another over the course of the chapter. It's really, really fun like this. But yeah, I really like the various documents that we see throughout this chapter. There's just like so much stuff in here that's fun. A couple of the ones that we didn't mention is a recipe for newts as the newts are normally poisonous and not edible. But if you scald them with hot water and wash them thoroughly, and then pickle them in 24 hours in a week solution of permanganate of potash, then they become edible.
Gretchen:
This was also found out because this was scientists who ate their coworker. They were like, yeah, we really like talking to him and he was really good at his job. But unfortunately, he was blinded. So we decided to put him out of his misery and eat him.
JM:
Yeah, I knew I didn't possibly think of everything that's in there. There's just so many anecdotes and funny little but also troubling and disturbing things. And yeah, like, I mean, the workforce and the contradictory attitudes about that. If you really, really want to eat a newt. Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
There's another bit I really liked where there's an advocate of Latin, which reminded me of the character of Partridge from "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding, which is one of my favorite characters in that book. So I really like that little bit too. But yeah, the overall story of what happens in the real world does get a lot darker from this point on. And these primary source documents that we get, it's just a really fascinating look into how that all unfolds, because we get it from all points of society. And I think this is a really effective way of capturing that, not just like Čapek lecturing to us in third person, or you know, we get it through the eyes of the people who are living in this rapidly transforming world with the controversial newt problem on the rise.
Gretchen:
Yeah, we were talking about the speed of this novel, the first book, as things are developing, even though it is a global story and we're getting like perspectives from multiple different characters and multiple different people, it does take its time to really get to this point. And then...
JM:
It keeps things moving.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it keeps things moving. But it's like, this is like the beginning of like showing just how exponentially faster everything is getting, how it kind of like very much captures the newtmania of just this idea of this frenzy around the newts of this interest in the newts and the kind of heightened production and of not just the newts themselves, but like the culture around them and the work that they're doing and everything that is being done in society through the newts.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it is also a really interesting commentary on technology transfer and this rapid expansion of an ecological species that transforms everything around it, because at the beginning of the novel, the newts are really just confined to this one bay that they can't escape. But now they've been shipped all over the world and shown how to use just basic tools. They're able to put the pieces together and start building sophisticated stuff on their own and making scientific discoveries on their own, which we'll see what they do with and just a little bit here. But yeah, it's a really interesting, I guess, look at how technology develops throughout a civilization and how that can be artificially sparked by a more technologically advanced culture just kind of throwing these technologies out of population and not only just displaced from their native environment across the entire globe.
JM:
There's actually a very perfect quote from the book that illustrates kind of what we were starting to talk about with the speed of things in this book and how everything really just seems to race along. I believe this is towards the it's either at the end of book one or somewhere in book two. But okay, "in the new epoch, which G.H. Bondy inaugurated at the memorable general meeting of the Pacific Export Company when he uttered his prophetic words about the beginning of utopia, historical events could no longer be measured in centuries or even decades as had been customary in world history until then. But by the three months periods for which the quarterly economic statistics were published, because the making of history, if we may so call it, was now taking place wholesale. In consequence, the pace of history was accelerating, not extraordinarily according to some estimates by a factor of five. Nowadays, we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries today with our present organization of transport. It could be accomplished in three years. Otherwise, there would be no profit of it. The same is true of the liquidation of the Roman Empire, the colonization of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians, and so on. All these things could have been accomplished incomparably more swiftly if they had been put in the hands of entrepreneurs with a lot of capital behind them. In that respect, the huge success of the Salamander Syndicate, that has powerful influence on world history, undoubtedly points the way to the future."
I really think that's just Čapek talking to the audience in general, not necessarily just about the Salamander Syndicate. He knew what way the wind is blowing and now look at us. I look at news about technology that's like a year old and I'm like, well, that's ancient history now, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's the nature of technology and also the nature of capitalism. Capitalism needs to keep expanding and expanding in order to survive. So both of those types of accelerations are very relevant to this novel.
JM:
Yeah, he seemed to just get so many things and I don't know. It's really sad to me that Čapek didn't even, I mean, I'm sure being in part of the Second World War would have been terrible and he might not have made it anyway, as many in Czechoslavkia did not, but considering the fate of his brother. I'm always thinking about some of these authors we see on the podcast and thinking like, well, what if they had lived a few decades longer and seen how things would come up? What would they be thinking now? What would he have to say about the atomic age, right? What would he have to say?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, like, I know we still need to get to the next section, but just as the Newts represents so many things, the fact that the situation we see at the end of the book does map so well on the mutually assured destruction aspect of the future that Čapek didn't see is really interesting.
Nate:
Yeah. And I guess on the subject of modern technology progressing really fast and possibly towards some kind of mutual destruction, I was taking a look at the three passages from the section that I wasn't able to, well, I guess they're in different languages and they're not translated for us. So I ran them through ChatGPT version 5, which is now already banned made obsolete by version 5.1. So just in those couple weeks, they basically redid the underlying algorithm. But according to GPT 5, so take this with a grain of salt, one of the paragraphs that is in the Latin alphabet is a mixture of Arabic, Swahili and Dutch Afrikaans, some kind of Creole between those languages. And it gives a decent and plausible translation.
JM:
I don't necessarily think that Čapek was probably not an expert in any of these languages. But he certainly seems to have been really interested in cultures all over the world. And Klima talks a lot about how he collected things from everywhere and how much he likes to travel. And like Mark Twain wrote a lot about his travels, and has many books published to check about his travels all over the place. He probably picked up us mattering of knowledge of a lot of things here and there, including being able to be slightly multilingual, at least in terms of writing some things down. But some of that stuff, it wasn't like there was that much of it.
Nate:
No, right. Yeah. So I mean, we have that one document in the Latin alphabet. And then there's two others that are not. So there's one in Japanese, which appears to be a news report of a Japanese visitor or to the United States talking about the Newts. But GPT seems to think that the Japanese is poorly written or might even be like incorrect characters.
The other one is what appears to be written in Javanese script, but it appears to be just like total gibberish. So yeah, it's interesting that he put those in there. I thought there was a neat touch.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Just Čapek having more fun, I guess.
Gretchen:
Adds to the international feeling of it.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. We can see at the end of book two, despite that rousing patriotic narration that all is actually not well. And there are territorial disputes going on among human nations because of the expansion programs enacted by newt labor. And Mr. Povondra has a bad feeling. And indeed, things are about to come to the head. And now he's starting to wonder if it's actually not a great thing. And it's his fault that he let the captain in to see Mr. Bondy. And now he's basically responsible for messing up the entire world.
Not surprisingly, the first skirmishes between Newts and humans had occurred years before. And it had to do with the illegal piracy/enslavement of Newts. And this is something that wasn't in up the ladder of civilization. He waited until we're with the Newts to tell us about this, even though it happened a long time ago. Again, that's kind of an interesting stylistic choice.
There's some newts on the Cocos Islands that decided to defend themselves. And the captain of the raiding ship, a good British naval man, responded kind with firing machine guns upon the Newts. And the Newts used the explosives supplied to them for work against humans and basically massacre all but one of the British sailors. And Britain decides to retaliate and they send a boat with lots of guns. And, well, there's all kinds of stuff on from here with the French, Japanese, and Dutch all somehow getting involved. And the Newts start to raid farms inland for foodstuffs. And the farmers start to riot.
And the Newts are now armed and they can torpedo French ships. Who is responsible? Why? The people who put arms in the paws of the Newts. But who's that? Only every factory, every bank, every nation by now. The French and British are at each other's throats over an accident with fortifications and explosions in the channel. And who started it? Who knows? The French Newts might have possibly had a lot of wine to drink.
The French journalists wonder if Britain is aware of the massed German newt army. But no one wants to listen to the French journalist who points this out, because his name is the Marquis de Sade.
Nate:
Yeah, I thought it was a great touch.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Čapek is such a joker sometimes, just like, well, of course, we would listen to the Marquis de Sade.
Gretchen:
That was one of the parts when I was reading this in public, I laughed out loud at.
JM:
Yeah. But this is where the definite Nazi parallels are loud and clear in this book, mostly. So the German philosopher by the name of Wolf Meynert writes his "masterpiece on the decline of human civilization, which prominently features the Newts". And to me, although it accepts human responsibility, it definitely has a fascist tone to it.
Gretchen:
It starts with Meynert basically saying the reason there's so much conflict is because humans haven't eliminated anyone who's if there's a group of humans, they will try to like live together despite differences when you should actually eliminate people who are different from you. That's where we failed, which is a very Nazi like ideology there.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like this. We can accept that the West is falling now, right? Like we could all accept this. So now what are we going to do about it? He makes a lot of claims that they have no use for or understanding of art, mysticism or the spirit or any of the other finer human things that they're a veritable horde of billions of mediocre, average subhumans. And yes, the newts will unite overthrow their oppressors and become the dominant power in the world. And he says, "there is no doubt that the Newts world will be happier than the human world. It will be unified, homogeneous and governed by the same spirit. Newt will not differ from Newt in language, opinions, faith or demands on life. There will be among them neither cultural nor class divisions, but only the division of labor. There will be no masters and no slaves, but they will serve the great Newt entity, which will be their God, their ruler, their employer and their spiritual guide. There will be but one nation and but one standard. It will be a better and a more perfect world than ours was. It will be the only possibly happy new world. Very well then, let us make room for it. There is nothing that expiring mankind can do now other than to accelerate its own demise and tragic beauty, unless it is too late, even for that."
And yeah, it sounds like some guy yelling about communism, right? That's what it sounds like. That yeah, those damn Bolsheviks, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
But perhaps more poignantly, perhaps from the position of the author, although it carries some of the same messages that this is I think is really interesting. So not long after we get this mysterious pamphlet from a figure called X, published in English about the Newt problem again. And this is definitely a warning. And it's definitely a bit strident, but you can see how it would have troubled the people reading it at the time. And nobody really knows how many newts there are, and how many emplacements and machines and weapons and factories. And what if Meynert was right? What if the water rises up to claim ownership over the dry land? And the silence of the Newts is terrifying. Why don't they give us terms? Why don't they open negotiations? And he more or less ends his pamphlet with "you fools, stop feeding the Newts, stop employing them, dispense with their services, let them emigrate to do wherever they can feed themselves like other marine creatures. Nature itself will deal with their excessive numbers. If only man, human civilization and human history will at last stop working for the salamanders and stop supplying the Newts with arms, put an end to supplying them with metals and high explosives, stop sending the machines and human manufacturers. You would not supply teeth to tigers or venom to snakes. You would not light fires under a volcano or breach flood protection dams. Let an embargo be imposed on supplies to all the oceans. Let the Newts be put outside the law. Let them be accursed and excluded from our world. Let a union of nations against Newts be set up."
Finally, the words of X finally do seem to bear fruit. There's the Louisiana earthquake and a swath of the state gets submerged and flooded. And it's the first of several such disasters. And the next is in China and of a much larger magnitude, but not many people in the West really paid attention to that. I don't know if it must be a total coincidence, but I was vaguely reminded of the Doctor Who story, "Enemy of the World", because coming up with the chief salamander and all the earthquakes and stuff like that.
Nate:
Yeah, I didn't put two and two together, but yeah, that's good.
JM:
An underground bunker of scientists working to upend the world. And there's this weird hint at the end of the book, which we'll get into, that I don't necessarily think you should take it face value. I mean, it depends on how you want to take the story. But there's a weird hint that there's actually a human being behind the chief salamander. But the weird hint is very clearly pointing at a very specific person in history at that time. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that.
Gretchen:
A very German name.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. So what could it be? Well, there's a sudden increase in volcanic activity, maybe? Or what? So about nine days after all this stuff starts, there's been a massive disaster in, I believe, Africa as well. But around one in the morning, nine days after, there's this massive radio interference blocking out all kinds of bands, and a voice comes over the channels and it says,
"Hello, hello, hello, the chief salamander speaking. Hello, the chief salamander speaking. Stop all broadcasting, you men. Stop your broadcasting. Hello, the chief salamander speaking. Hello, you humans. Louisiana calling. Kiangsu calling. Senegambia calling. We regret the loss of human lives. We do not wish to inflict unnecessary losses on you. We only want you to evacuate the seashores in the places we shall notify you of, from time to time. If you conform, you will avoid regrettable accidents. Next time, we shall give you at least a fortnight's advance warning of the areas where we will enlarge our sea. So far, we merely have been conducting technical experiments. Your high explosives have worked well. Thank you. Hello, you people. No need for alarm. We have no hostile intentions towards you. We only need more water, more coasts, more shallows to live in. There are too many of us. There's no longer enough room for us on your coasts. That's why we have to dismantle your continents. We shall turn them all into bays and islands. In this way, the overall length of the world's shoreline can be increased by a factor of five. We can all instruct new shallows. We cannot live in the deep ocean. We shall need your continents as infill material. We have nothing against you, but there are too many of us. For the time being, you can move inland. You can move up into the mountains. The mountains will be demolished last. You wanted us. You spread us all over the globe. Now you've got us. We want to be on good terms with you. You will supply us with steel for our drills and picks. You will supply us with high explosives. You will supply us with torpedoes. You will work for us. Without you, we cannot remove the old continents. Hello, you people. On behalf of the Newts of all the world, the Chief Salamander offers you cooperation. You will work with us on the demolition of your world. We thank you."
And that's just the beginning. And naturally humanity at first doesn't want to take this lying down, but it seems even there's little that can be done. Anyway, the Newts have a proposal ready that will surely make the important parts of mankind happy and satisfied. They figured out how to extract gold from seawater and are offering lots of lots of gold in exchange for the continents. And they continue to broadcast their new demands, interspersed with nice little bits of gramophone recordings of trots and polkas and cool stuff like that. "Your recordings", which are all about the Newts and the sea. Because yeah, the Newts were such a sensation. And I guess some of these gramophones were saved by the Newts underwater and they've been transmuting them for the pleasure of humanity. It's had their radio broadcasts interrupted. So that's nice.
They have a conference up in Vaduz, up in the Alps. And this ends up much like the Munich agreement in reality. So now the Newts are sort of a Nazi parallel like I was saying earlier. And Britain is completely cut off by sea. And they simply don't have enough aircraft to do anything, let alone maintain their colonies. Although there's much contention over recognizing a Newt state, as the Newts all over the world might want to join such a body if they thought it existed. They eventually the representatives at the conference agree some Newt reps should be at the thing as well. So they prepare their finest hotel bathtubs only to have a troupe of very human lawyers hired by the Newts show up. And yeah, that was really funny too.
There's heated negotiations in which China is essentially sold off over the unintelligible protests of the Chinese delegate. And the Newts lawyer says, "gentlemen, speaking as a human and fellow countrymen, I advise you to take the offer of the Newts, which is given freely and out of kindness, because they don't really have to offer you anything."
So yeah, things progress from there. And the world starts to be partitioned off. And yeah, it's a funny scene. It's a real farce. But in the end, it's, yeah, it's tragedy for the human race. We have a last look at Mr. Povondra, who's now very old, and he's hanging out with his son and they've gone fishing in the river. And although Povondra has been this Newt expert the whole time, he is quite confident that the Newts will never come to Czechoslovakia because they're too far from the ocean and no coastline, everything will be fine. But he might not really believe this.
Gretchen:
The Newts are going to stay in Dresden. They're not going to want more breathing room. Yeah, they won't come here.
JM:
You can tell that despite that Povondra is just really consumed with the whole situation. And he still thinks about how much he's responsible and has her in their boat on the river. Povondra thinks what he sees is a Newt head in the water and he's like, Oh, a Newt! And he immediately like basically goes into delirium because he's so shocked and upset. And they take him home. And yeah, the implication is that this man who became special despite himself, who was able to save all these newspaper articles and so on is probably on his last. And so is Czechoslovakia most likely. Yeah, I mean, it certainly was, right, in reality.
But that's not the last chapter. We get a final chapter where the author and the writer have an argument with each other about what's been done with this book and with the characters and civilization. And the writer calls the author out for being a terrible person and wanting to leave Mr. Povondra to die in such a horrible way and not giving humanity a chance to fix itself. And all kinds of other things. It's pretty neat. But yeah, it's also like, if the book wasn't meta before, it's definitely gone that way now. And again, it's funny, but you can really feel the frustration in it because the writer, well, I guess is the author, the author Čapek is saying like, Well, that's just what everyone wanted. Everyone just did what they wanted. And I wasn't responsible. I mean, but then the writer is like, Yes, you are, you wrote, you made up the whole thing. You told me what to say. And like, and he's like, that X person, that was you. And it's like, that's like, they asked themselves what will happen in the future. And the author's like, Oh, shit, I don't know. Well, maybe they'll be like, Newt on Newt warfare eventually. And you'll have your Atlantean Newts and your Lemurian Newts. And they'll start this massive conflict. And they'll wipe each other out in this big intercontinental conflagration. And eventually, maybe the last humans will come down from the mountains and start to reclaim the earth or something like that.
It's like, he's trying to give it this, okay, like you can sort of imagine this far future post apocalyptic SF adventure out of it all. But I don't think his heart's really in that. And he does say during that part that he's like, casually just drops in. Oh, yeah, the chief salamander. That was some guy. He used to be this Prussian army officer in the First World War. Like, for some like, wait, what? Like, oh, okay, Hitler. Okay, right. Okay. Yeah. Like, I don't think you have to necessarily take that as said, if you want to believe in the situation of the War of the Newts, in the way that we normally believe in novels, where you're kind of you're putting yourself in the world. This is obviously an alternate 1930s. The parallels it evokes between real life. And that are so profound that.
(music: John Philip Sousa - "The Triton March" on bells)
general spoiler summary and audio adaptations
So about that last chapter, he wrote this actually in this is an anthology published in the Soviet Union called Den Mira, which is Day of Peace. And it was edited by Maxim Gorky, and published in Moscow in 1937. And people around the globe described how they had spent the day on September 27, 1935, which supposedly "the day of peace". And in the writer's day, Čapek wrote, "Today I completed the last chapter of my utopian novel. The main character of this chapter is nationalism. The content is quite simple, the destruction of the world and its people. It's a loathsome chapter based solely on logic. Yes, it has to end this way. What destroys us will not be a cosmic catastrophe, but mere reasons of state, economics, prestige, and so on."
So yeah, I mean, it's interesting that that was published in official anthology published by the well renowned Maxim Gorky in Russia. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to reading about, you know, the changing face of the Newts, I guess, as we go. And there's just so much like, do they really have culture of their own? Or do they not? Right? So that's what I was kind of, we don't really get their perspective, right? So at the end, when you hear that voice coming on the radio, it's like this dark threatening surprise, right? Even though we know that something bad's coming, and then all this exploitation and darkness and everything, there has to be some kind of repercussion, right? Just like, you can't help but feeling, Oh, no, it's awful, right? Really powerful moment when we kind of the tables are turned, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, the last chapter with Povondra like is pretty sad. Like it is really like kind of, it did get to me the first time I read it.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't assume he was talking about that. I mean, he didn't say, because I mean, to me, the fact that it's a conversation like that makes it kind of an extraordinary chapter. And maybe that was his way of trying to deal with the darkness that he didn't really want to even like that, that he had to, you know, and it was like, Oh, how can I like, make this sort of, I don't know, entertaining to me, I guess, because I'm so depressed about this, right?
Gretchen:
Like, yeah, the chapters leading up to the last Povondra chapter, it is this slow decline of humanity. But because of the satire, and because it's more of a global issue, it is kind of funny. I mean, because it is this satirizing of what nations would do in this situation. But then, just like we see in the second book, where you have the the footnotes that are kind of like bringing in more of the human element that was missing from the main text, like the Povondra chapter kind of acts as like the book end of showing the real human cost of everything.
JM:
Yeah, I don't really do like Čapek's authorial voice, too. Like, so the subject matter is really heavy, but his delivery is just very fun. And he kind of tricks you into this playful attitude, really, when you're reading about this stuff, because that's the kind of tone that he has a lot of the time.
Gretchen:
Yeah. One part that I do think is pretty funny is there's the part that is describing London rebelling against the Newts. And so they're being starved because they can't get any cargo in or out. And there's this one part where it says like they were forced to eat their most prized racehorses. And the higher ups, they made the sacrifice of eviscerating their golf courses so that they could have crops planted there. It's funny, this pointing out of, oh, well, you know, the real sacrifices that these people have to make, or at least people in power have to make is, oh, they have to sacrifice their golf course, and they have to sacrifice their racehorses. So even in that, the suffering is sort of made comical there.
JM:
Yeah, that does seem to be a theme that he's unearthing here. Because yeah, I mean, you can see that he's fascinated by technology and by progress and stuff like that. But also, due to the things that are happening in the world, what are the sacrifices that these fine nations of ours are going to have to make?
Nate:
I guess one final thing on the last chapter. This, again, total coincidence, but it reminded me of the last chapter in "The Soul Giver" where Nervo breaks the fourth wall and kind of preemptively talks to his critics. And you can see Čapek kind of doing the same thing here.
JM:
It probably was a coincidence, but that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't think of that. Yeah. One thing I noticed, I first noticed this in the Apocalist Book Club, did an episode on this. And then in the essay in Uneven Futures, John Rieder also mentioned this. And I guess the latter in particular was trying to be very topical about now because he referred directly to the Donald Trump administration. I think he wrote this shortly before the end of the first Trump administration. It seems like a lot of modern readers from like nowadays interpret the Newts also as a metaphor for climate change. I don't know what you guys think of that in particular. I mean, it's a little like, okay, maybe it wasn't so much what Čapek was thinking, but I guess an interesting way to put a new spin on it.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know if you can necessarily attribute modern conceptions of climate change and that we're getting global warming by the emissions of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But pollution and the expansion of industrial waste throughout European cities was definitely a major concern, especially in London. I mean, the Thames was filthy for a long time. And definitely.
JM:
Well, by the 50s....
Nate:
No, I mean, even in the 19th century, there were ads out and cartoons and British papers and magazines as depicting the Horde state of the river. And yeah, I mean, going into the 1950s, certainly a lot of rivers in America with industrial pollution. And well, I guess that's also true of the 19th century, too, where you have these mills just basically dumping all their waste into the rivers. So I mean, there is hard evidence of human expansion causing negative effects on the environment that way. But I think the concept of global warming, as we know it, certainly would not have existed in the 1930s.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, like, I don't think that's on Čapek's mind, obviously. But I mean, I think that that interpretation, at least, you know, thinking of like something that it could be seen of that maybe Čapek didn't anticipate, I think that is something that you could make a comparison to. Yeah, I think that that's what's really rich about this text is that there are a lot of things that Čapek couldn't have anticipated or events that hadn't happened yet that I think still can be seen reflected in the Newts. Just like I had mentioned, I think that one of the reasons that the Newts also have so much power near the end of the novel is also that even though at this point, the Newts have shown their intentions of wanting humanity to give over its land for them, there are still nations supplying them weapons because one, it's for profit, but also because, well, we're still going to supply them against our human enemies. And that's why I brought in the comparison of mutually assured destruction and the Cold War and the race for like nuclear weapons. There's still this, even though it would ensure that all of humanity dies, it means you still get a one up on other nations. And obviously Čapek wouldn't have anticipated the nuclear bombs or the atomic bomb, but you can still see that idea, the basic desires to gain nuclear weapons in the Newts and in the what the Newts represent.
JM:
Yeah, I think it's definitely an interesting question that I think that perhaps there are a few things maybe that I mean, generally it seems like this book, even among I guess the mainstream of readers of especially Czech fiction and so on, this book is very highly regarded, but it does seem like from reading around about especially people who read it nowadays, there does seem to be a little bit of confusion. Like, well, what is Čapek really standing for? Like, what do the Newts represent? What do they mean, right? And I get that, but I think that's actually part of the power of it, too. It's not a single thing, it's humanity almost, right?
In the meantime, though, the Newts are very endearing a lot of the time in the book. You're like, Oh, I wish I knew a newt, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I will say that sometimes I'll look at some of the illustrations for like the covers and stuff of some of the books and I'm like, they're kind of cute. There's like the specific one that shows like a Newt curled around the world and it has almost like, there are times when Čapek will describe a Newt and I'll think I don't think that's what a Newt looks like. That's not necessarily how I would describe what I think a Newt is, but there's this one illustration that kind of gives it like a puppy-ish look and they are described sometimes as like puppy-ish.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And it is kind of cute.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of moments like that. I couldn't really figure out what the noise is that the Newts are supposed to be making, though. They're always making the, I kind of finally decided on like, when Van Toch is like, calling them like they're kittens or something like that. Yeah. And they're always making the tststs noise, right? And it's like...
Nate:
The BBC radio production definitely made it sound like a kitten type call.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like kind of, I was thinking kind of tstststs like...
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, we have a few adaptations. There's a puppet show that's happened. There's two audio versions. So the first one is a BBC production from 2005. And yeah, that one's that one's pretty solid.
Nate:
Yeah, I really like that one. It's interesting that the changes they make. So they frame the story by using Čapek and Olga as characters, basically discussing the novel and what he's planning with it as they go through with it. And Olga's like really animated the entire time. And it's kind of funny. But changing the frame this way really puts the political commentary with regards to Nazi Germany's rise more at the forefront way earlier. Because when you're reading the novel, you don't really know where this story is heading at the beginning when it's just like these mix of like, weird fiction and comic scenes. And really the only explicit ties to the rising Nazi regime come in the final third of the novel. But framing it in this way really puts that pretty much up front through the entire time, which is an interesting way of doing it.
I thought the acting was really well done. They capture, again, not everything from the novel, like not every document is in there. But yeah, they managed to-
JM:
It is longer than like some of these BBC adaptations, as good as they are. They like they're an hour long of some like classic novel. And it's like, well, you can't really get everything in there. But this one's an hour and a half. So it's a decent length. Yeah, the acting is pretty solid, which I like a lot. And yeah, like there's some silly accents, but it's good. It's fine when I don't mind. I don't know. Yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I did not have a chance to listen to that one. But I did listen to the other audio drama that was inspired by "War with the Newts". Just "Newts!".
JM:
"Newts!" Yeah. I'm going to preface this by saying these guys did this really recently back in 2022. Probably a lot of it was recorded during the pandemic. They did a really good job. It's, what is it? The team up with PRX and The Truth podcast. I'm not familiar with that. But they did a good job. It's a well done production. This wasn't really for me. I don't know. I mean, these guys, they deserve accolades. They deserve to be praised for the work that they did. I just, I don't know, the style of it didn't entirely work for me. I don't know. It's one of these things. It's semi-musical.
Nate:
Oh, it's definitely musical. Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's a musical. That trope of people just breaking out into songs, that's the musical tradition.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, some people are really into musicals and musicals definitely have their own culture and sense of humor, which this one definitely does. And yeah, it's not really my thing either. I wasn't really able to get that far into it. But I think if you like musicals, this one is definitely well done. The production values are really, really high. So something like this sounds appealing to you. I would definitely say check this one out. It's like.
JM:
Yeah. Again, maybe it's a personal bias, but again, like the acting in the BBC production was pretty good. And I didn't have to question some of the choices in this one just in general, like on a personal level. But again, I don't want to knock them down because I think they really did a really fun and cool thing with it.
Gretchen:
Yeah. As someone who I'm not like a huge musical fan, but I do like some and I thought it was fun. Yeah. I did listen to the full thing earlier today before doing this. I wanted to have it kind of fresh. And I thought it was good. I think that yeah, again, if you're if you're into musicals, it's a good one. It's a nice they did a good job with it. And they kind of get a broader range of music. Or you know, I kind of thought would be interesting if they did a little bit more of a range or variety. But there's some there's some different styles of music, which feels appropriate for a work that does such a variety of styles.
And I think that it does almost capture because when you're reading "War with the Newts", something I think is interesting is that there is a considerable passage of time through the novel like Povondra, his son is who is like a kid when the novel is like around the opening is like an adult by the time that it ends. And so I think that what you get with the "Newts!" musical, there's is sort of a movement through some music. I think it would have been interesting if it emphasized that a bit more.
But yeah, I thought it was good. I would like to see the BBC version, though, I think that does sound interesting.
Nate:
And this one's like three hours long too. So yeah.
Gretchen:
It's broken up into episodes. And there are six episodes that are about 30 minewts long.
Nate:
Yeah, so I mean, it's cool they were able to produce all that stuff for sure. I love to see more stuff done on a professional scale by podcasters of these adaptations of novels, because I think there's really a lot of room to do interesting things with sound design and all that stuff that might work really well with some of these stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I do think that the modern podcast is an interesting, cool, different way to look at the story and keep it alive. Like, now this book is still alive, and that's still capturing people and reading the book, "Uneven Futures", it has lots of essays about everything from Le Guin and Joanna Russ books to a lot of more modern stuff that I'm not familiar with, and the show Farscape and all kinds of different things. And then it's got "War with the Newts" by far the oldest book that they decide to cover in here at every pieces by a different contributor. So it starts off with Delaney, and you know, we got, I think Delaney is probably like the second oldest work in here, and then there's the "War with the Newts", you know, and it's just like, yeah, I mean, and considering a lot of the adaptations seem like they're newer, right? And people read this, and I came across somebody on YouTube who is doing a video on an introduction to Czech literature, and she covered stuff from starting in the 1800s to more recent stuff, and there was nonfiction and fiction on the list, and it included "War with the Newt"s by Čapek, and she talked a bit about it and related to, apparently, she's something of an expert in this field, and yeah, it was cool, just see how much attention this book actually still gets. I mean, when you consider that a lot of SF from the 1930s is almost forgotten now by a lot of people, it seems like maybe the fact that at least in his native country, if nowhere else, because yeah, like, my friend knew him as the robot guy, right? But in Czechoslovakia, certainly, there was a lot more to Čapek than that, and it seems like that legacy has helped to, yeah, "War with the Newts", I mean, maybe it's not a household name in English like "RUR" almost is, but it definitely seems to be still garnering attention and thought, and yeah, this podcast from 2022, although the format is maybe not totally to my taste, it seems like I could imagine this being a musical, it's perfect, right? Like, in a lot of ways, it just fits.
Gretchen:
It's interesting because there is another musical version or an adaptation that I did find like excerpts from online, there was a choreographer and like director who had done another "War with the Newts" musical, like back in like, I think it was like 1998. So I think it's just really interesting that this work draws people, it almost like music becomes a big part of it.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Newt Mania.
JM:
Oh, Čapek himself was quite interested in music, right? So it seems like he was a collector of music from all over the world, that's something that Klima noted in his biography, and I'm sure he would have been thrilled to know that "War with the Newts" became an internet musical podcast. In the future.
Gretchen:
I mean, I guess that's why, you know, the Newts, that's why they start and end all of their messages with a little bit of a salamander dance or a Triton trot, polka, or opera or what have you. Even the Newts know the power of music, even if they may be according to some thinkers in the work, don't have any music of their own.
JM:
Yeah, it certainly wouldn't really interesting digging into surrounding ourselves with Newts. Now, I just have to say that we're Newts and it makes me really happy. So yeah, despite the apocalyptic nature and everything, but yeah, read the book, check out the adaptations. I definitely, again, like finding is one of those conflicting things in my head. It's like finding that recent podcast is just so, it was really cool. I wish I kind of could get more into the style, but I'm going to keep it and listen to it again someday. We'll see. We'll see how I feel about it. But really nice work, though, that they did.
And yeah, it's interesting to, I mean, there's so many BBC audio adaptations from the early 2000s and beyond. And it's just really interesting, like in sort of changing the subject to the BBC again, but they never really gave up on that tradition. And they keep doing really good radio dramas, where basically, you don't feel any concession to the fact that it's radio, which I think is one of the neatest things about that format. And that's something that the English drama, I guess, not just the BBC, but some others as well, they seem to understand that really well is that you can actually have a drama on audio and not have this like voice coming in all the time, telling people what's going on, right? It's like, you know, you don't have to have this narrator. When I listen to some of the Audible dramas and like Graphic Audio and stuff like that, it feels like they can't really decide whether they want to make an audiobook or a drama, right? That's somewhere in between. And sometimes it bugs me, although sometimes it's probably good. Nate, you said that Irish, what was it? "Ulysses", I think? Production was really, really solid, right?
Nate:
Oh, yeah, Irish Radio did a production of "Ulysses" in the early 1980s. And yeah, it's so good, you would have thought Joyce was writing a radio play instead of a novel. Like, yeah, some of those chapters really, really come to life in an absolutely incredible way. And it just showcases that that's a type of a book to be read aloud. "Finnegan's" Wake is the same way. There is an audiobook in production that's done by this art collector out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Most Ever Company. They're not finished with it yet. They release about one chapter a year. But they do a very good production of it. Again, in that almost radio play type format, where they introduce some of the sounds that are in the book and do some clever things with some of the audio design. I mean, chapter two, there's a ballad at the end where it gives you sheet music and the guy actually like plays what's written on the sheet music and sings the melody into it. It's just really, really well done reading of the work.
But yeah, I like it when works like that lend themselves to that kind of radio play performance, rather than just a, I don't know, like a straightforward narrative, like you get out of a Dickens or some other author like that, where a lot of the novel is really the author speaking through a narrator to you for a chunk of it.
JM:
Yeah, but then so much when some of it is told in dialogue, too, it's so nice to have like an actual cast and so on.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Well, we really enjoyed this "War of the Newts", I think, and it's been really great to cover this one. And yeah, I don't know if we're going to do the other Čapek SF works, but maybe sometime in the fairly distant future, because we do have a lot to cover. But this is really awesome. And I'm happy that we revisited Karel Čapek. And it's certainly, I'm not done reading all the works by him by any means. That is probably his series of three or four interconnected novels. I forget what it's called, unfortunately, but I don't think they're SF adjacent, but it seems like they're interesting literary pieces. And I'd like to take a look at that, that series as well as some of the other works at some point.
But we should maybe talk about what we'd like to be doing next time on Chrononauts. I believe Gretchen, it's your time to hold the fort, as we say.
Gretchen:
Yes. So I was very hard pressed to figure out what I wanted to read. There are so many titles that I was thinking of, and I wasn't sure which one to decide. But I really enjoyed our episode on linguistics and the works that we read for that. And one of the works that we didn't read for that, but we did bring up is "Native Tongue" by Suzette Hayden Elgin. So I do have a copy of this book, and I've been meaning to read it for a while. So I think that I am going to make that our next host choice pick.
Nate:
Awesome. Yeah, it sounds really interesting novel. And yeah, I look forward to reading it, definitely.
JM:
Cool. I'm really curious about that too. That's cool as well. But yeah, well, with all that said, I believe that I have some work to do. I'm actually working on selling Atlantic Canada as we speak. Soon it will be under the waves. I know no hard feelings, but I'm getting a lot of gold out of this. So I'm a very happy human. And yeah, long live the human race and all its glorious endeavors. And we hope you've enjoyed this trip with us on Chrononauts. Definitely make sure that you keep your teach yourself Newt book handy, because you might need it in the near future.
This has been Chrononauts. We hope you'll join us next time. Good night.
Music:
German, Edward - "In Praise of Neptune" (1912) https://imslp.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Neptune_(German%2C_Edward)
A. C. B., Miss - "Sea Nymph Polka" (1855) https://imslp.org/wiki/Sea_Nymph_Polka_(Miss_A._C._B.)
Sousa, John Philip - "The Triton March" (1892) https://www.marineband.marines.mil/Audio-Resources/The-Complete-Marches-of-John-Philip-Sousa/The-Triton-March/
Bibliography:
Klima, Ivan - introduction to "War with the Newts"
Rieder, John - "On Karel Čapek’s Prophetic Science Fiction Novel ‘War With the Newts’" in "Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival From Speculative Fiction" (2022)
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