Krakatit

Engineer Prokop stumbles onto the formula for an explosive of unprecedented power, which he names Krakatit after the Indonesian volcano, capable of breaking apart the atomic structure of anything it touches and triggered remotely by nothing more than a matching wavelength of radio signal. Čapek wrote the novel in 1924, two decades before nuclear weapons existed, and its premise, a discovery so dangerous that simply possessing the knowledge makes its inventor a target for every government and syndicate that learns of it, reads now as one of literature's earliest and most exact anticipations of the moral position atomic scientists would actually find themselves in twenty years later.

After an accidental explosion leaves him injured and delirious, Prokop discovers he gave away the formula to a colleague while feverish and cannot remember doing it, and the novel's back half becomes a paranoid chase across a landscape of financiers, foreign agents, and a princess who wants Krakatit for reasons of her own, each faction convinced that whoever controls the explosive controls the balance of power in Europe. Čapek keeps Prokop's own physical and mental state, feverish, injured, alternately lucid and hallucinating, inseparable from the novel's larger argument: a discovery this dangerous was never going to be handled rationally, by its inventor least of all, and the political machinery converging on him operates with exactly the same feverish, half-controlled momentum as his own damaged body.

Written between the two world wars by a writer who had already imagined mechanized labor revolt in R.U.R. and religious catastrophe in The Absolute at Large, Krakatit completes an informal trilogy of Čapek novels each built around a single runaway invention, and its anxiety about scientific discovery outpacing any institution's capacity to use it responsibly reads as consistent Čapek doctrine rather than a one-off premise. Albert Einstein reportedly admired the novel for grasping, well before the physics existed to make it literal, the specific moral bind of a discoverer whose invention immediately exceeds his own ability to control who uses it and to what end.