Interestingly, Rossum is a play on the Czech word rozum, which means mind or reason. 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.

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. The play has three acts that skip through decades in which we see the evolution (and disaster) of robots in society. hits it on the head with everything one can say about the topic of robots in a small amount of pages. In Capek’s perception, a robot was a serf on the road to liberty, and that concept still echoes through in today’s robot stories.

When Karel Capek was a teenager, these Czech peasants organised themselves into an agrarian political party and promptly dominated the elections. Robot referred to the peasant class in end-19th century Czechia, and these peasants were not much more than serfs, forced to live a life of drudgery for a quarter of the year for their landlords. That’s the standard arc for robot stories, isn’t it? Now, see where the word robot comes from and its connotations. Nowadays, almost every robot story in science fiction starts with the robot being indentured and soulless and ends with some form of freedom or recognition for the robot. It is interesting to dive a little deeper into this. is not a novel, it is a play of about 60 pages. It is not the first work ever written to feature an artificial person, but the word ‘robot’ was first coined by Karel Capek’s brother Josef. (1920) is famous in science fiction history for giving us the first instance of the word ‘robot’.

R.U.R. by Josef/Karel Capek