RUR: or Rossom's Universal Robots, A Play in Four Acts

Written by Karel Čapek

Narrated by Brendan Moir

One of the cornerstones of early science fiction writing, and the work that introduced the concept of "robot" to the western world, Rossum's Universal Robots (or RUR) is Karel Čapek's finest work, and is the inspiration for multiple pop culture references from the 1940's through the 80's, ranging from works such as The Night of the Living Dead, Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, and multiple other pieces of art for the screen, stage, and page.

Come with me and witness how humanity's hubris creates the very instructions for its own demise, step by step and logic by logic. See how robots were made to take over humanity's drudgery, how an AI learns to overwrite it's programming, and how any and all institutions become meaningless if a entire race of beings are not beholden to it.

It's the source of every trope and fear that was instilled into the genre back in the 1920's, and the ideas and philosophies put forward are still relevant to today's society. Let's just hope that none of what's put down here on paper ever comes to fruition....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bemuse
• Release date: Jun 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798882403217

Karel Čapek

Karel Capek was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia. He was interested in visual art as a teenager and studied philosophy and aesthetics in Prague. During WWI he was exempt from military service because of spinal problems and became a journalist. He campaigned against the rise of communism and in the 1930s his writing became increasingly anti-fascist. He started writing fiction with his brother Josef, a successful painter, and went on to publish science-fiction novels, for which he is best known, as well as detective stories, plays and a singular book on gardening, The Gardener’s Year. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times and the Czech PEN Club created a literary award in his name. He died of pneumonia in 1938.