What I am reading

This is the drama which introduced mankind not only to the word ‘robot’ but also to the concept of an inevitable war between humans and machines. R.U.R. (or W.U.R. in this German translation – a strange, yet very smart translation of the title) was written in Czechoslovakia in 1920 and holy crap, this is an awesome piece of literature!

In a certain sense, Čapek wrote a timeless piece. Kind of like the 1993 Jurassic Park movie, some technology got used which is very much outdated by now, but everything else is still fresh as heck. I belief, that the reason why we can still enjoy R.U.R. almost 100 years after it was written so much, is, that it is a very human drama. One that deals with the very basic and never changing motifs of love, empathy, fear, ambition, greed, human hubris (kind of like Jurassic Park, now that I think about it) and on top of that it throws in a bunch of robots.

The structure of the drama is great, the characters are great, the plot is great, the dialogues are great, R.U.R. is just plain great!