Splinters

One longstanding aim achieved fairly recently – reading the play which gave the world “robot” to the world. R.U.R .[Rossum’s Universal Robots] is a 1921 play by Czech writer Karel Capek which introduced not just the term, but the whole concept of an artificial being created for drudgery, achieving consciousness, and displacing their human originators, still the quintessential science fiction dilemma which bounds down the ages.

While its a fairly brief play, dealing with huge questions within a slight frame, it does so in a way both humorous and moving, as well as being weirdly innovative and eerily prescient. It works as both metaphysical drama and political satire, and as with many of the more enduring examples of the latter, can be interpreted in a number of different ways,  both left and right appropriating it at one time or another.  One group which didn't claim it for their own were the Nazis, who instead hounded Capek to his grave. It seems Nazis and their descendants are back in fashion these days, what with the Adolf Brent Show and our next government’s new pals in the European parliament. Its about time this play got a revival too.