War With The Newts

Working in the fantastic satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Karel Capek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders on an Indonesian island. Capek sardonically portrays the reactions of the civilized world-from horror to skepticism, from intellectual fascination to mercantile opportunism-and the ultimate destruction from which it (and the newts) might not escape.