There were robot stories before there was science fiction. One you’ve probably heard of was written just a little more than a century ago by a struggling Czech writer named Karel Čapek. Haunted by the mechanized carnage of World War I, Čapek was deeply suspicious of predictions that the technological wonders of the modern age would lift the world to postwar prosperity. In 1921 he expressed his doubts about humankind and its new machines in a play called R.U.R. and caused an international sensation. Within two years of the premiere R.U.R. had been translated into thirty languages.