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R.U.R.: the original of the robots, revived

Edward Willett @ 05-10-2008

I’ve known about Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. for a long time, but I’ve never seen a production. Almost nobody has: the play was first performed in 1921, and ran for just four performances on Broadway on 1942. But now this classic science fiction play, the one which introduced the word and the concept of robots to the world, has been revived in Chicago. (Via About Last Night.)

Wall Street Journal theatre critic Terry Teachout recently reviewed it:

“R.U.R.” is a tale of modernity run amok, the story of Rossum’s Universal Robots, an island factory that manufactures lifelike but soulless artificial humans in vast quantities, then ships them all over Europe to grateful purchasers who use them to do their dirty work. This being science fiction, things inevitably go wrong: Dr. Gall (John Henry Roberts), one of the white-coated scientists in the employ of Rossum’s Universal Robots, makes the fatal mistake of building a few hundred robots that can feel emotions, upon which all hell breaks well and truly loose.
What makes “R.U.R.” so interesting is that its symbolism is wide open, meaning that it can be interpreted in any number of ways — as a satire of capitalism, a parable of the law of unintended consequences, even a critique of secular humanism and its discontents. What makes it so theatrically potent is that Capek (pronounced CHAH-puck) wrote it as a comedy that ends in apocalypse — or, in his words, “A Collective Drama in a Comic Prologue and Three Acts.” What makes this production so effective is that Shade Murray, the director, has contrived to give “R.U.R.” a contemporary, even postmodern tone without doing violence to its letter or spirit. Imagine a cross between “Ball of Fire” and “Night of the Living Dead” and you’ll get the idea: The costumes are quaint, the sets simple but implicitly futuristic, the between-scenes music space-age lounge. Stir in the brisk, witty performances of Mr. Murray’s superior cast and you get a show that is at once horrifying, entertaining and — forgive the cliché — genuinely thought-provoking.

(By the way, according to Wikipedia, a 35-minute adaptation of a portion of the play was broadcast on BBC Television in February, 1938–making it the first piece of television science fiction ever produced. A 90-minute adaptation followed in 1948.)

If you’re in Chicago and want to check it out, it runs Fridays through Sundays through October 25 at Strawdog Theatre Company, 3829 N. Broadway St.

(Image: Strawdog Theatre Company.)

Rise of the giggling robots: toddlers accept robot as a peer

Edward Willett @ 06-11-2007

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered that it doesn’t take much to get toddlers to accept a robot as just another kid. (Via New Scientist.)

They put a 60 cm-tall robot called QRIO (pronounced “curio”) into a classroom with a dozen toddlers (video here) and programmed it to giggle when its head was touched, to occasionally sit down, and to lie down when its batteries dies. A human operator could also make it look at a child, or wave as one went away. Over several weeks, the toddlers began interacting with QRIO pretty much the same way they did with other toddlers. They’d even help it up when it fell, and when its batteries died and it lay down, they’d cover it with a blanket and say “night, night.” (Awwww….)

There’s been a lot of recent research on trying to make the robot-human interaction better. Researchers have also taught a robot to dance to a beat, or to a partner’s movement, and are working on giving robots a sense of humor. Add in the martial-arts robots of a few years ago and that robot that conducted a Beethoven symphony, and you’ve got to think a true pass-for-human android a la Blade Runner may not be all that far away.

Whether you think that’s a good idea may depend on how much you took Terminator to heart.

(By the way, this is also the topic of my newspaper science column this week.) (Photo: J. Movellan et al., UCSD.)

Joel Shepherd continues to hit paydirt with ‘Killswitch’

Tomas Martin @ 31-10-2007

I’ve been reading the last in the trilogy of Cassandra Kresnov novels by Australian author Joel Shepherd and I’ve been very impressed. Following on from Crossover and Breakaway, Killswitch is set on the planet of Callay. In the peace after a war with the android-creating League, the more conservative Federation government has recently transferred its powers from Earth. The lead character is one of the androids, Cassandra Kresnov, a super-intelligent, super strong version of the more limited grunts used in the war. In the first book, Crossover she defects and moves to Callay, creating a huge political standoff between many different factions.

Shepherd writes a clever, multi-dimensional tale of artificial humans. It’s reminiscent of the great work done with the Cylon characters in the new Battlestar Galactica but impressively these books were first published in Australia before that TV series saw the light of day. The worldwide publication of the trilogy is richly deserved. As well as some gritty, dynamic action sequences and rich political worldbuilding, the characterization of Cassandra is spot-on. I’d recommend a lot of people pick up these books. You can read my review of Killswitch in this month’s SFCrowsnest.

[image of the books Pyr cover via SFCrowsnest]