R.U.R. 1989

R.U.R.—written in 1920—garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word “Robot.” Mass-produced, efficient and servile labor, Čapek’s Robots remember everything, but lack creative thought, and the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must attempt to learn the secret of self-duplication. But their attempts at replication leave them with nothing but bloody chunks of meat. It’s not until two robots fall in love and are christened “Adam” and “Eve” by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant.

Where does it come from?

It is amazing how R.U.R. hits it on the head with everything one can say about the topic of robots in a small amount of pages. The play has three acts that skip through decades in which we see the evolution (and disaster) of robots in society. Honestly, it is like Capek took Mary Shelley’s monster of Frankenstein with the commentary on man playing God, added the idea of mass-production and so created the robot idea. R.U.R. is the missing link between Frankenstein (1818) and Asimov’s I, Robot (1950), and all Capek had to do was add the idea of production line work in factories. Interestingly, Rossum is a play on the Czech word rozum, which means mind or reason. Let that stand for the Enlightenment which gave us industrialisation and factory work, and Rossum’s Universal Robots is translated as Reason’s Universal Serfs.