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“R.U.R. stands for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’. First of all, this is the play that gave us the word ‘robot’. Čapek had this idea: his stage is filled with humanoid, marching, working, mechanical humans. He originally thought to call them labori, which would be a Slavic-ish plural of the foreign word ‘labor.’ But his brother said, ‘No, let’s make a noun out of the Slavic root word for work/labor: rob-‘. So he called them robots, and there we are to this day…The crucial element of robot design in the play is that they should not have a soul. I think nowadays we would say consciousness, but although Čapek was not a religious person, he referred to it as a soul. The ideal robot worker does his job more quickly and more accurately than any human precisely because it does not feel pain, fear, hunger, love, or any other human emotion.” Read more...
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi
Yvonne Howell, Literary Scholar
