"The Cylons were created by man ..."

In a world where our Internet connection has become the equivalent of a junkie’s “fix,” Karel Capek’s work enjoys the virtue of far-reaching prescience. His 1920 drama R.U.R. (aka Rossum’s Universal Robots) did far more than introduce “robot” — a derivation of the Czech term for slavish labor, robota — into the lexicon. It foresaw a future in which survival is at the mercy of machinery and …