“Nobody can hate man more than man.”
Humans have cracked the secret to luxurious life! An island that creates robots that are sent around the world to perform all the labor that is necessary for the human race. These robots look human but lack the fundamental essence of being, or at least that is what the humans say. These robots are treated like objects and discarded just as easily. The play follows first the humans that create the robots, living solitary lives on the island, and then the uprising of the robots as they kill all but one human. They believe themselves to be free, but are they? The humans took with them the secret to engineering more robots and now they are a dying breed. As the robots fight against time to discover the secret to replication, the book reflects on what it means to be human.
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) book was a part of a binge of sci-fi and dystopian novels from the 20th century, and several people I asked recommended this book after I mentioned liked the early concepts of robots or androids. This book was actually the first to use the word robot and popularize it, so we have R.U.R. to thank for all the sci-fi we love today involving robots. While I don’t typically love reading plays, this one was good, though I have some grievances with their depiction of women. Though I’ve found that with every book within this genre written during the 1900s, the women are shown or written about in the best manner. This can be expected from this time period, but it is still aggravating. Overall, it is one of the founding books of the Sci-fi genre 5 out of 5 stars.