The Absolute at Large

The Absolute at Large is a novel by Karel Capek. The Czech writer Karel Capek wrote his novel Továrna na absolutno in 1922. It was translated into English and published by Macmillan in 1927 as The Absolute at Large. The novel is a satirical piece of science fiction, and starts with the invention of an "atomic engine" in the future year 1943 which can convert matter directly into energy. Such engines can operate machinery for months from a single bucket of coal. But the inventor quickly discovers that his engine has an unfortunate side-effect: It generates pure divinity as a waste product. The consequences of the wide-spread adoption of the new engines therefore gives rise to unexpected complications in human society. The novel is full of sardonic but incisive comments on society, capitalism and religion. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)