Join us to celebrate two sci-fi centenaries: the 100th anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's birthday and of R.U.R., the play that introduced the word "robot" to mainstream culture.
The second online event in a series of workshops on AI Narratives in Central and Eastern Europe will take place on 15 January 2021 and focus on the representations of intelligent machines in Eastern European SF, with a particular focus on the works of Karel Čapek and Stanisław Lem.
Karel Čapek was a Czech playwright who coined the word “robot” – used for the first time in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered on 25 January 1921, exactly a century ago. Stanisław Lem was a Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, and the author of Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971). Lem was born in 1921 and, to mark the anniversary, 2021 has been declared ‘the year of Lem’ in Poland. Our workshop is a celebration of these two centenaries.
This event is part of a research project funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation Inc.