born Jan. 9, 1890, Malé Svato 0148; ovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
died Dec. 25, 1938, Prague, Czech.
Czech novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.
010C; apek's "black utopias," works showing the dangers of technological progress, include the cautionary play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots (1920), a depiction of a society dependent on mechanical workers called robots (a term he coined from a Czech word for forced labour). The comic fantasy The Insect Play (1921; with his brother Josef) satirizes human greed. The Makropoulos Affair (1922) was made into an opera by Leo 0161; Janác 0306; ek . 010C; apek explored aspects of knowledge in the novel trilogy Hordubal (1933), Meteor (1934), and An Ordinary Life (1934).