R.U.R.

Čapek’s R.U.R. is credited with inventing the word “robot.” In Ivan Klima’s introduction to R.U.R., he notes that the play is based on a short story cowritten by Karel Čapek and his brother, Josef, “The System.” It was Josef who invented the word robot, Klima argues.

Karel Čapek was influenced by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, and he was skeptical of the sciences replacing religion. Klima’s introduction also includes a quote from The Saturday Review of July 23, 1923: Čapek dubs Alquist “the Tolstoian architect” who believes “technical developments demoralize man” (xiv). Other scholars trace Čapek’s ideas about robots back to E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1817 short story “The Sandman,” which includes a human falling in love with a beautiful female automaton, similar to Robot Helena.

Several science fiction tropes, or staples of the genre, come from R.U.R. The act of mistaking humans for robots, and vice versa, appears again in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into the film Blade Runner.

Čapek’s narrative, where robots kill all of humanity and take over the earth, is seen in one of the most famous pieces of popular science fiction, The Matrix.