My impression is that central Europe (which I apologize for lumping together) has a pretty long-running tradition of literary absurdism and surrealism. They're

My impression is that central Europe (which I apologize for lumping together) has a pretty long-running tradition of literary absurdism and surrealism. They're works that are more allegorical than "scientific" or "futuristic," even though they might be responding to (or "riffing on") actual early sci-fi of the techno-futurism variety. As some examples, besides his R.U.R., Capek (Czech) also wrote The War with the Newts. It's an animal fairy tale that predates George Orwell's animal fairy tale by a decade. Franz Kafka, obviously, was born in Prague and spent his life in central Europe. Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1937) is a Polish analogue from the same decade. Bruno Schulz's short story anthology The Street of Crocodiles is another one. After World War 2, you have people like Stanislaw Lem (Polish) writing a lot of farcical science fiction and Jan Svankmajer (Czech) making a lot of grotesque, farcical stop-motion animation.