How often this setting has already been used is difficult to say, but the classic evil suppression for maximum profit is as old as humanity. Innocent How often this setting has already been used is difficult to say, but the classic evil suppression for maximum profit is as old as humanity. Innocent creatures that are enslaved by the Salamander Syndicate in a technocratic world dominated by economic interests, fanatism and intolerance.
Comparable to Orwells´Animal Farm, Capek describes the cruel exploitation and its possible consequences. Social criticism, fantasy and Sci-Fi combine to a book that was unique in its time and is written with so much dept, wit and ingenuity that it doesn´t seem oldfashioned, boring or lengthy at any moment.
I don´t know if the integration of fictional articles describing parts of the plot has its origins in this work or if it has already been used before by another author. However, the idea is brilliant and has been used over and over again, be it with Pratchett's famous footnotes, quotations, memos, short descriptions or the classic news articles before chapters or as a short refresher between the chapters.
Capek should be named in one line with Orwell, who described the consequences of political extremism and Huxley, who envisioned a soft media/pharma happy go lucky dictatorship as the one who combined it with colonialism and capitalism in it´s most extreme form. One could even go so far as to say that he is even better than both much more popular and well-known authors because he integrates and caricatures all elements and spheres of power and indoctrination.
The way the whole society transforms and integrates the newts in their economic system and how the stages of suppression are just defined by the requirements of the economy opens up room for many interpretations, innuendos and philosophical and social theoretical implications.
Political and economic extremism has hardly ever been satirized in such a deep, perfect and timeless way. One could say that Capek owned both Cassandra and Michel de Notredame and predicted a large part of world history just as it happened after his early death. The main question is who is who in which era and on whose side we are standing right now and if it couldn´t be that we have already been turned into newts without even recognizing it.
Mario the lone bookwolf
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Books:
capek-karel
(3)
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