If one looks into the history of robots in fiction, you discover that the first mention of the word is in a play written by Czech writer Karel Čapek - R.U.R. (subtitled Rossum's Universal Robots in English translations).
Recently, I was able to track down a copy of the play at Project Gutenberg. The robots in Čapek's play are artificial people made from synthetic organic matter rather than machinery. Like many stories of robots that have come down to us, Čapek's robots take over the world - though their reign is short lived.
It's very difficult for me to look objectively at R.U.R.. There are many more books or plays on robots that are better reads than this play, but it was the first, and we have to judge the work in that light. For that reason alone, it's worth reading.
In addition to plays, Čapek' wrote several sci-fi novels before the invention of sci-fi as a separate genre. Many of these books are available at amazon.com, though I have chosen to download two of his novels that are available for free - The Absolute at Large (available as mobi at Fadedpage) and The War with the Newts (available as html at project gutenberg australia). In case of The War with the Newts, I printed the html as a pdf and then converted the pdf to mobi.
According to a wikipedia article, The War with the Newts takes a different approach to the relationship between humans and non-humans, where the non-humans become a servant class in human society. I'm a few pages into that novel at this writing......much too early for comment.
Update:
After I began reading The War with the Newts, I soon realized that I had misread the one sentence description of the novel in the Wikipedia article of R.U.R.. The non-humans in the novel are not robots as I had interpreted the sentence, but rather a different sort of non-human. The above text in this blog has been edited to correct that error.
No comments:
Post a Comment