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R.U.R. is a 1920 science-fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek.
R.U.R. stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots, a phrase that has been used as a subtitle in English versions).
The play had its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové; it introduced the word robot to the English language and to science fiction as a whole.
R.U.R. became influential soon after its publication. By 1923, it had been translated into thirty languages. It was successful in its time in Europe and North America. Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in his 1936 novel War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant-class in human society.
More information: The MIT Press Reader
The robots described in Čapek's play are not robots in the popularly understood sense of an automaton. They are not mechanical devices, but rather artificial biological organisms that may be mistaken for humans.
His robots resemble more modern conceptions of man-made life forms, such as the Replicants in Blade Runner, the hosts in the Westworld TV series and the humanoid Cylons in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, but in Čapek's time there was no conception of modern genetic engineering (DNA's role in heredity was not confirmed until 1952).
There are descriptions of kneading-troughs for robot skin, great vats for liver and brains, and a factory for producing bones. Nerve fibers, arteries, and intestines are spun on factory bobbins, while the robots themselves are assembled like automobiles. Čapek's robots are living biological beings, but they are still assembled, as opposed to grown or born.
One critic has described Čapek's robots as epitomizing the traumatic transformation of modern society by the First World War and the Fordist assembly line.
The play introduced the word robot, which displaced older words such as automaton or android in languages around the world. In an article in Lidové noviny, Karel Čapek named his brother Josef as the true inventor of the word.
In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands and is derived from rab, meaning slave.
The name Rossum is an allusion to the Czech word rozum, meaning reason, wisdom, intellect or common sense. It has been suggested that the allusion might be preserved by translating Rossum as Reason but only the Majer/Porter version translates the word as Reason.
The work was published in two differing versions in Prague by Aventinum, first in 1920, followed by a revised version in 1921. After being postponed, it premiered at the city's National Theatre on 25 January 1921, although an amateur group had by then already presented a production.
More information: The Project Gutenberg
Robots of the world,
you are ordered to exterminate the human race.
Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women.
Preserve only the factories, railroads,
machines, mines, and raw materials.
Destroy everything else. Then return to work.
Work must not cease.
Karel Capek
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