Elysia 7
- ELYSIA 7 - A black ink and gray color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size vellum paper. It appears in the book, "Elysia: the Coming of Cthulhu," by Brian Lumley, published by Ganley in 1989.
My mother and father came to America from Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s. I was born in 1930 and most of the men I came to know while growing up were cousins or friends of the family who also came from Czechoslovakia. They all spoke the Czech language and eventually l learned to understand what they were saying. In their conversations the word, "robotnic" came up often, it meant, "worker," and I put no other meaning to it until years later . . .
In 1950 I began reading science fiction stories, some of which featured, "robots," like Isaac Asimov's magazine series of robot stories that were later collected in book form as, "I, Robot". At that time I made no connection between those SF robots and my Czech "robotnic" relations. Until I came across a Czech writer, Karel Capek who wrote a stage play in 1921, "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots). It was this Czech writer who first came up with the word,"robot" so undoubtedly, the word "robotnic" as used by my Czech relatives and friends was an extension of that word.
However, robots in American science fiction were typically mechanical men like the one you see in my drawing, or others with a more modern metallic design. But the robots in R.U.R. are "humans" created artificially in bio-chemical vats, and they are so accurately reproduced, that they even have souls. Rossum produces them to serve as workers so that "real" humans no longer have to work. But his "robots" revolt and defeat their masters, thereby winning their freedom to be human beings.
So, though my Czech dad and his friends and relatives may have referred to themselves as "robotnics," I don't think they all came out of chemical vats! I was a robotnic once, until I became an illustrator.
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