The Machine Stops

Original review here

The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster, was a fantastic short story that blew me away as much as the previously mentioned anthology.

It was published in 1909, and yet it contains one of the scariest, most accurate depictions of what a world dominated by reliance on technology could look like—and one might say, already looks like today.

The story is in the public domain, you can find a free copy of it in Alice & Books’ website, the story can also be found in The Eternal Moment, and other stories which is at Project Gutenberg, I hope Standard Ebooks does their own edition as well soon.

While Orwell’s 1984—published in 1949–deals with a corrupt form of government using surveillance, rewriting history and in a state of constant war; the world in The Machine Stops is honestly kind of perfect—at least on paper.

Humanity lives underground after the atmosphere is no longer inhabitable. There’s an hexagonal room assigned for one person, and everyone gets to live in one, everything can be reached at the press of a button: food, music, films, literature, a bed. There is instant video communication, video conferencing, online shopping.

Ideas, knowledge, cannot, and should not, be obtained from their original source. It is wrong after all, since feelings and experiences only undermine reality and facts.

Physical contact is frowned upon, you don’t visit people in person. Water is hot, the lights are comfortable. You can request to become a parent, you can request euthanasia, but birth and death rates have to stay balanced. No matter, there is no pain anymore, the Machine knows best.

Travelling is mostly unnecessary, but flying machines exist, although everyone closes their windows, nobody wants the Sun shining over them, nobody wants to look down to the old cities and landscapes found in the surface, there are no ideas to be gained there.

I don’t usually talk so much about what a book contains, but this is just the idea and the setting, there is also a story to be told, despite it all being so short, there’s still a lot more. It is an easy read to fly through in a single sitting. I highly recommend it.

When reading The Machine Stops, you will inevitably be floored by the fact that it was written in 1909 - a full 98 years before Steve Jobs announced our very own pocketable portal screens in 2007. Just how E.M. Forster was able to capture not only the functioning of our technologies but the nature of their impact so long ago I have no idea. Most notably, his keen understanding of the impact of the separation of the virtual persona from the actual human while, by all measures, one engages with the art, music and ideas of humanity more deeply than most people ever do in physical space. As a result of this virtual existence, the protagonist recoils from the tangible through sunsets to her own son. The failure of the manicured and isolationist ‘society’ in which she lives is similarly rejected, as she bathes in stagnant water and eats rotten fruit before she is finally denied rest. The people of The Machine Stops reject religion as archaic and abhorrent, while coming to worship The Machine itself and the one tangible and personal object which they carry.

Just what was E.M. Forster observing in his own community to inspire this? Perhaps seemingly modern issues aren’t as new as we tend to think, and changes to the way we communicate always usher in challenges and new waves of isolation and hypocritical religiosity. Or maybe he just had a time machine. Above all, I wonder what seemingly insane science fiction written now will turn out to be all too prescient.