It is difficult to understand how the analogy of the newts to colonized peoples could not have always struck readers as one of the most obvious features of the novel.

Which is to say, they decide to go into the slave trade. With the pearl trade exhausted, the Pacific Export Company makes a momentous business decision: instead of using the newts’ labor to supply them with pearls, they will market the newts’ labor itself. In fact, they turn out to be so prolific and such good pearl gatherers that within a few more years the entire Pacific pearl fishery has been depleted, and the market is glutted. Their numbers multiply from a few hundred to more than a million in only a few years. Once freed from their predators, they are also astoundingly prolific. It turns out that the newts are not just handy at building dams and finding pearls. The Dutch captain of a pearl-fishing boat gives them knives to combat the sharks in return, they give him pearls. The plot concerns a species of intelligent, dam-building salamanders, the newts of the title, who are discovered in an isolated bay in the Pacific where their population is barely maintained against predation by sharks. It is definitely an odd novel, one with no central character, flitting across decades and continents at a frenetic pace. But if “War with the Newts” is a jeremiad, it is the jeremiad as delivered by a stand-up comic. Čapek is certainly telling his readers about their own vanity, folly, and absurdity. Čapek was a master of the light-hearted journalistic form called the feuilleton, which Webster’s defines as “a part of a European newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader.” “War with the Newts” originally appeared in a Prague newspaper as a series of feuilletons the central section of the novel pretends to be a collection of haphazardly collected, wildly ludicrous newspaper clippings about the Newts. This article is excerpted from the book “ Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival From Speculative Fiction“Īt the same time, “War with the Newts” is also a very funny book.

War with the Newts by Karel Čapek