Metzger is a Ph.D., specializing in literature and drama at the University of New Mexico. In this essay, she discusses the theme of creation and the responsibility of the creator in R.U.R.

In R.U.R., Karel Capek comes very close to echoing the ideas first explored by Mary Shelley a hundred years earlier in Frankenstein (1818). Like Shelley, Capek is also asking man to consider the ramifications of science. It is not simply whether man can achieve something through technology, but whether he should that interested Shelley. It is the question with which Capek struggled as well. The creature that Victor Frankenstein builds is meant to prove that its creator can supplant God, that God has become redundant. The creature is bigger than man, and illustrates Frankenstein's belief that he can create a man who is superior to that which God has created. Old...