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Karel Capek – RUR and War with the Newts | Review

Title: RUR and War with the Newts

Author: Karel Capek

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 358

Rating: 4*/5

Karel Capek – RUR and War With the Newts

This book was on course for a 5/5 but then about a third of the way through it did the same thing that George Orwell did in 1984 where the action suddenly cuts out so there can be pages and pages of background information. In 1984, it was a detailed history of the different nations in the postapocalyptic future. In this book, the equivalent is a lengthy section that reads like an essay on how the newts reproduce and how they act during scientific experiments.

Still, this is a great little read, and there’s something here for everyone – but particularly for fans of classic science fiction. It also has the benefit of basically being two books in one. Let’s take a look at each of them.

RUR is short for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ and it’s credited with introducing the word ‘robot‘ to our vocabulary. It’s also a stage play, which makes it easy to absorb and highly entertaining, and I just flew through the pages and loved the whole thing from start to finish. I particularly liked how it posed the question of who’s ultimately responsible for the actions of a piece of software or a machine. Is it the machine itself, or is it the human who designed and created it?

Karel Capek

War With the Newts contains many of the same themes, except this time it’s focusing on a species of intelligent newts that humanity discovers and subsequently takes advantage of until they eventually rise up against them. What’s interesting here is that the war itself doesn’t take up much of the book, but rather it tends to focus on the events that led up to the war and humanity’s role in them. It’s very cleverly done, but like I said – there’s a lengthy bit in the middle that gets kind of tedious, and I found it difficult to pick up momentum again after that.

Still, though, this is definitely worth reading – especially for hardcore sci-fi fans. I’m definitely glad I picked it up.

Karel Capek Quote

Click here to buy RUR and War with the Newts.

Jack Kerouac – Doctor Sax | Review

Title: Doctor Sax

Author: Jack Kerouac

Type: Fiction/Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 219

Rating: 6/10

Jack Kerouac – Doctor Sax

Doctor Sax is yet another one of Kerouac’s experiments with free-verse autobiographical writing, and it tells the story of his childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts. Yet while it might be about his younger years, it was actually written in 1952, when the author was thirty years old and living with William S. Burroughs in Mexico City.

You can tell he was living with Burroughs – the other great stalwart of the beat generation had clearly rubbed off on him, and much of his style can be seen in Kerouac’s words. Unfortunately, because of this, it feels like you’re reading a cheap combination of the two, a voice that belongs to neither Kerouac or Burroughs; there’s also less cohesion here than there is in other Kerouac works, although he can be forgiven for that because his work doesn’t really make much sense at the best of times.

Still, it’s interesting enough just to read about the enigmatic Doctor Sax, a character which haunted Kerouac as a child and which followed him in to adulthood. The author himself described him as “my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover” – you’ll understand that description if you read through the book and make it to the end.