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I would recommend it to a younger audience. THis book is a play written about Artificial intelligence. It is very short and doesn't take much to read it.
He could properly be called conservative, if one could recover an older conservative tradition that was not linked so powerfully to business and corporate interests. The character in this play are somewhat beside the point, irrelevant. In both versions the robots or Cylons are obsessed with replicating themselves, though in BSG the Cylons are capable of laboratory reduplication, but aspire to procreation sexually. The robots of Capek's play have far more in common with what we would today call cyborgs or androids, being apparently human creatures made by humans. The ideas about human beings, about the centrality of labor to give their lives meaning, of the pressures of modern capital to strip workers of their essentially human characteristics are what the play is all about. Karel Capek's R.U.R. In both versions the robots or Cylons turned against their creators. Capek shares much in common with this earlier tradition, seeing the greed of corporate interests, which would reduce workers to mere machines if they could.
Capek's own politics do not fit comfortably on the current political grid. Most 20th century plays are focused on the exploration of characters, not ideas. The novel that is usually considered the first SF novel, FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley, also is about an artificially constructed human being. The first SF feature length film, Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS, also had a robot as one of its major characters. He does not believe that much genuine good will arise out of increasing technological development.The play is perhaps most significant for having popularized the use of the word "robot," a word coined by Karel's brother Josef.
But Capek also shares with this older conservative tradition a fear of technological development. In both versions the robots were created to undertake work for humans to make their lives easier. Clearly Capek anticipated many ongoing questions in SF.This remains one of the important works of SF of the 20th century as well as one of the most crucial works in the history of imaginative explorations of what it means to be human through the creation of artificial people. To take merely one instance, there are many parallels between Capek's robots and the Cylons in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (the new version, not the 1978 one). Historically this was not always so. Capek's particular version of the robot has many connections with subsequent depictions of constructed people. (short for Rossum's Universal Robots) explores instead ideas, leaving character to one side.
I find it fascinating that this, the first truly important SF play, focuses on robots. This tradition in American politics was transformed earlier just after the half century mark in the 20th century, much to the chagrin of traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk. The robots are emblematic of what, Capek believes, modern capital want to do to workers, taken to their logical extreme.The play is, therefore, a profoundly political play. John Adams, for instance, the second American president, wrote passionately about the need for the executive branch of government to stand between the greed of the economic elite and both ordinary Americans and the republic.
Avoid this version like a robot plague. This is a very lean version, with some characters being removed or merged with other characters. Whole sections of original dialogue have been removed, or at best, changed.
It was like listening to a play in a language I barely understand - I couldn't believe it, and thought I may have had it wrong. don't skip this one - it's the best part of the play. Read "Newts", and get the same message in a novel you'll never forget, by an author who will never be forgotten. But I didn't: it WAS clumsy, stilted, unbelievable. "R.U.R.", from the author of "The War with the Newts", is a major disappointment. Thank goodness I didn't buy tickets for and then have to sit through the least believable dialogue I have ever read, nor did I waste a lot of time wondering why Glory accepted the elephantine attentions of Domin.
It surprised me how much Capek touched upon present day issues in a volume authored over 80 years ago. This is definitely a great read. It's got enough 'depth' despite it's small package to interest just about anybody.
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