Café littéraire : des marionnettes aux automates...

Karel Capek (born in Bohemia in 1890 and died in Prague in 1938) was one of the most important Czechoslovak writers of the 20th century. The word robot, which first appeared in 1920 in his science fiction play R. U. R. (from the Czech title Rossumovi univerzální roboti), was coined by his brother Josef from the Czech word robota, meaning "work" or "serfdom".

Theme: from puppets to automata, from automata to robots, from robots to AI...
Carlo Collodi: The Adventures of Pinocchio / Marc Petit: The Giant Dwarf / Thomas Day: The Nüremberg Automaton / Mary Shelley: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus / Karel Capek: R.U.R. (= Rossum's Universal Robots) / Issac Asimov: Le robot qui rêvait ( short story ) / Anne Delaflotte-Mehdevi: Trop humain / Boris Vian: short story: "Le danger des classiques" in the collection "Le loup garou" / Jean Baret's trilogy: Bonheur TM, Vie TM et Moret TM / Sofia Samara: Hard Mary (ed. Argyll 2025) / Chuck Wendig: Les somnambules / etc.

As an extension of this theme, let's take a look at the edition of the ten words of the French language for 2026: "Dis-moi dix mots d'un monde à avenir", which invites us to reflect on the world that lies ahead and encourages us to explore all its possibilities, both those we fear and those we wish for: alunir, anticipation, continuum, dystopian, humanoid, particle, program, theory, transmuter, sidereal.