R.U.R.
By Karel Capek
3.5/5
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About this ebook
One of the classics of twentieth-century theater, this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed play by Czech playwright Karel Čapek (1890–1938) looks to a future in which all workers are automatons, or "robots" — a word this play made a permanent part of the language. The robots revolt when their manufacturing formula is changed to make them more irritable and to give them the human ability to hate, and the resulting catastrophe makes for a powerful and deeply moving theatrical experience.
"It is murderous social satire, done in terms of the most hair-raising melodrama," wrote Alexander Woolcott in his 1922 review of the first U.S. performance of this universally admired play. Heywood Broun wrote, "Čapek is potentially one of the great men in the modern drama. He has devised a scene at the end of the third act as awesome as anything we have ever seen in the theatre." This is the scene in which one of the last remaining humans, knowing himself and his species to be doomed, muses: "It was a great thing to be a man. There was something immense about it."
Karel Capek
Karel Capek was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia. He was interested in visual art as a teenager and studied philosophy and aesthetics in Prague. During WWI he was exempt from military service because of spinal problems and became a journalist. He campaigned against the rise of communism and in the 1930s his writing became increasingly anti-fascist. He started writing fiction with his brother Josef, a successful painter, and went on to publish science-fiction novels, for which he is best known, as well as detective stories, plays and a singular book on gardening, The Gardener’s Year. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times and the Czech PEN Club created a literary award in his name. He died of pneumonia in 1938.
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Reviews for R.U.R.
207 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The origin of the word robots, although they are not so much robots as golems. Only there are lots and lots and lots of them -- eventually millions. It all starts out well but ends epicly badly. It suffers somewhat from a certain didacticism about technology, Communism, and other themes, that I don't remember in War with the Newts and other Capek books. That said, it is a classic that I've been meaning to read for a long time and am glad I finally got around to it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a science fiction play published in the 1930s which is most famous for first coining the word "robot" to describe an artificial man or woman. The robots produced by Rossum's Universal Robots are not made of metal or plastic though (despite the cover of this SF Masterworks edition), but with a mysterious substance discovered by the company's founder which behaves exactly like living protoplasm but which has a different chemical composition. These robots have flesh, bones and organs composed of this alternative substance, so one might say they are a slightly different species of human, rather than what we would understand today by the word "robot" (which comes from the Slavic root "rob/rab" which relates to work, worker, slave). The play covers a wide range of ethical issues raised by the mass production of these artificial men and women, which have been further developed of course by many other writers, in particular Isaac Asimov. Asimov's three laws of robotics don't apply here, as the robots decide they are superior to humans and take over, killing their former masters. There is a whole spectrum of high drama and tragedy here in this fairly short three act play. Deservedly a seminal science fiction text.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This play is credited as the first use of the term as robot.Since it is a play a lot of the the action of the revolt and attack of the robots happens off stage.The way all the men fall in love with Helena is so over the top I see it as played for laughs.You see the origin of a lot of the troupes of the genre set up here.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It’s fascinating to me that R.U.R. was written in 1920, and is highly relevant nearly one hundred years later, with the very real concerns of robots replacing human workers and Artificial Intelligence posing a possible threat to the human race in the news. In addition to using the play to make comments about humanity, and the dehumanizing effects of science and mass manufacturing, Karel Čapek was clearly ahead of his time. Right up there with his masterpiece ‘War With The Newts’, and very enjoyable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The origin of the word robots, although they are not so much robots as golems. Only there are lots and lots and lots of them -- eventually millions. It all starts out well but ends epicly badly. It suffers somewhat from a certain didacticism about technology, Communism, and other themes, that I don't remember in War with the Newts and other Capek books. That said, it is a classic that I've been meaning to read for a long time and am glad I finally got around to it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brilliant, bizarre play. The first "cylons" (as in Battlestar Galactica) and a wicked skewering of both capitalism and communism, from 1920s Czechlands.