The Absolute at Large

By -
The Absolute at Large, by Karel Čapek

It's Karel Čapek's first novel!  Printed in 1922, two years after the play R. U. R., this is another science-fiction premise, and--at least at first--it's a bit comedic.

It a futuristic 1943, an engineer comes up with a machine (the Karburator) that produces power by annihilating matter completely; the energy contained in each atom is liberated and consumed, thus providing practically infinite power from tiny amounts of fuel.  Unfortunately, it turns out that matter has two parts.  There is the physical part, which produces the atomic energy, and there is also the spiritual component, which, when destroyed, releases the Absolute into the air.  If you conceive of God being present in all matter, well, now it's free and floating around. 

Anyone who gets near a Karburator experiences religious ecstasy.  They perform miracles and healings, or give away all their goods to the poor, or start preaching, or perhaps even levitate.  The Absolute is inspirational, and it's also creative; put a Karburator into a factory and it will produce endless fabric or sausage snaps or whatever, no matter what raw materials it starts with.  But it doesn't seem to be intelligent.  It takes on the characteristics of the people it influences.

So the economy collapses because the Absolute does not understand supply and demand.  It simply creates, endlessly.  All the merchants have given away their possessions, and there is no one to move goods. In any case, somebody installed a Karburator in the mint and now there is endless paper money.  Pretty soon, factions arise and there is a devastating global war....

This is a great early SF novel!  I really enjoyed it.  Get hold of a copy if you're interested; it will repay the time.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more