Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Long before there was Terminator and Skynet, there was R.U.R., the Czech classic that gave us the word "robot".
The R.U.R. Factory, far from humanity on its own island, has produced the perfect product: Robots! Devoid of pain, love, and all human emotion, never tiring, never bored, unfazed by death they are the ideal worker for modern-day society!
All of this is about to change, and only Helena can see it. She is condemned to remain alone in her dread, as all of society embraces the robots and the automatons' presence increases. However, there has been a glitch in the programming. All of our assumptions may have been wrong. The robots may indeed feel pain. They may harbor passions and hatred, and the Robot Revolution may be near!
As retold and drawn by the young, award-winning Czech graphic novelist, Katerina Cupová, this seminal dystopian work by Karel Čapek (which gave us the word “robot”) makes the reader question the notions of work and progress and humanity itself. Through Cupová's deft hand, R.U.R. Is a sight to behold.
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
The 1920s Czech sci-fi theater piece that coined the term “robot” and set the bones of the many plots of “replicants” to come in modern literature gets transformed into a graphic novel, where fluid watercolors contrast with the heady philosophical dialogue and stark moral message. In a kind of anti–Blade Runner style, here the light and soft colors of the world and character portraits actively defy the darkness of humanity's drive to oppression that is so profoundly depicted in these pages.
—Meg Lemke, comics and graphic novels reviews editor, Publishers Weekly