Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?

Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages--with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life, through ritual incantation, to defend Prague's Jewish community --its modern form was set in motion by a play called "R.U.R.," by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Its 1921 première, also in Prague, set the agenda for the next century, and it has remained an apparently ironclad convention that all critical writing about the genre begin there. The drama gave us the word "robot," a derivative of an Old Slavic root related to "serfdom," and its narrative, of a rebellion among artificial workers, provided a metaphorical template--stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom. The word "robot" is still with us, and the underlying metaphor has a generous flexibility, encompassing two related but distinct ideas. One is that the first thing we would obviously do with artificial people is enslave them--as in, say, "Westworld."