Earlier this year, I read a short play called “Rocks, Algae, Water, Stars” by emerging playwright Jonathan O’Neill. O’Neill had submitted the play for consideration in the 4th Annual Lift-Off Festival of Science Fiction Plays at the Navigators Theatre Company, and the piece immediately caught the eye of literary manager, Melina Neves. As the Artistic director of this small Theatre company, I read quite a few short plays every year for our annual festival, and O’Neill’s play was one of them. Our mission as a company is to produce feminist science fiction stories, primarily written by women or female identifying people. “Rocks, Algae, Water, Stars” struck Melina and I as unique for several reasons—primarily because its main character was a female presenting anthropomorphized version of the Mars rover, Opportunity.

The Frankenstein Complex, a term coined by famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, and refers to the irrational fear of robots and android-like machines.

Karel Čapek’s formative play R.U.R. (or Rossum’s Universal Robots) is commonly referred to as the first piece of science fiction theatre. More importantly, R.U.R. is also the text from which the well-known term “robot” originates.