I just finished reading a play entitled “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).” It was written by a Czech in 1920 (premiered Prague, 1921), obviously just after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The play coined the term “robot,” derived from robota, the Czech word for “drudgery” or “servitude” (according to Wikipedia - I just online translated it, and it came up as “treadmill”…). It’s really an interesting read - a bit romantically overdramatized in parts, but that’s often tongue-in-cheek, a reflection of the typically sardonic Czech humor. The characters are also somewhat bumbling, which again is an old Czech character type (see “The Good Soldier Švejk“). The most interesting tie to Czech narrative culture, however, is the similarity between R.U.R. and the old Prague legend of the Golem, which is somewhat of a precursor to Frankenstein’s monster. The play is definitely worth reading, as it foreshadows (if not having directly inspired) so much of modern science-fiction (the play was in fact the first made-for-TV sci-fi movie, when it was produced by the BBC in the ’40’s). And what’s more, like the best science-fiction, it melds the past and the future to construct a very pertinent and surprisingly prescient contemporary social critique.