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.

Sadly I hear about this for first time myself. The word hvězdoplavba is somehow know and used, mostly in poetic context. I don't think it had any particular affect on the society tho. I'll go check some second hand bookstores for this gem.

Edit: after reading bit more about this, the author was kind of inspired by another Czech author Karel Čapek, whose works did and keeps influencing people (also coined the word Robot for "mechanical worker" (that's enough bragging for today)

First time hearing about this book.