This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R—but his less famous 1936 novel War with the Newts is actually a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century. It's also a sprawling, jumbled, irreverent story that turns out to be perfect material for an adaptation like Newts.
In the show, Ian and his collaborator Sam Jay Gold have taken Čapek's speculative story about how humanity might deal with the appearance of a second intelligent, speaking, tool-using species on Earth and added wealth of new layers, not the least of which is a catchy Beach-Boys-inspired musical score. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but if you listen to the series (and our interview with Ian), you might just come away with a new perspective on the nature of our relationships with other animals; on the human species' alternately tender and warlike instincts; and on Karel Čapek's underappreciated contributions to 20th-century literature.
Newts launched on June 7, and you can hear it at newtspod.com wherever you get your podcasts.
For a transcript of this episode and additional information about Newts, visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org/508-strange-newt-worlds
Pacific newt photograph by Connor Long, shared under a CC BY-SA license.
Notes
A special thank you to Ian Coss for spending time with Soonish and providing all of the music and sound effects files used in the episode.
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
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