Towards the Singularity? Čapek’s R.U.R. and Its Times

Abstract

In the previous chapter the modern utopia was defined chiefly by reference to Bellamy and Wells and their early twentieth-century antagonists: Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell. There is a name conspicuously missing from this list, that of the great Czech fantasy writer and satirist Karel Capek. Capek’s R.U.R. (1920), which gave to the world the term robot, differs from We and even from Brave New World in the radical degree to which it imagines the re-engineering of human nature. It is a drama, not a novel, and has generally been understood as a work of science fiction rather than a dystopia — two factors that may account for its comparative neglect within the field of recent utopian studies.2 Yet R.U.R. was the subject of intense public discussion when it first opened in London in 1923, and it closely foreshadows the continuing speculation about the ‘post-human’ and the ‘superhuman’ in our own times. Indeed, the development of computers and artificial intelligence has had the effect of reanimating scenarios that Capek and some of his contemporaries had long foreseen.