The Machine Stops
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The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story by E. M. Forster. It first appeared in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909, and was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928.
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Summary
The story describes a world in which the surface of the Earth has become almost uninhabitable, and most of the human population lives below ground. Each individual lives in isolation in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted but unpopular and rarely necessary. There are two named characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, who live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which is spent generating second-hand 'ideas' and communicating them to others, but Kuno is a sensualist and a rebel. He protests to Vashti about mankind's estrangement from the natural world, and confides to her that he has visited the surface of the Earth, where he saw humans living in the supposedly toxic open air. The Machine then recaptured him, he says, and threatened him with 'Homelessness' (i.e. expulsion from the underground environment).
Forster then describes the two-fold process that leads to the destruction of the underground civilization. First, humanity forgets its pretence of rationality and begins to worship the Machine. The exclamation 'O Machine!' becomes common, and criticism of the new religion is labelled as 'unmechanical'. Second, as predicted by Kuno, the Machine begins to break down, but by this time humanity, weakened by subservience, can no longer help itself. The story ends apocalyptically with the physical collapse of the Machine, and the deaths of all its inhabitants, including Vashti and Kuno, but with the hopeful prospect that the surface-dwellers will rebuild the human race.
Commentary
Forster wrote (in the preface to his Collected Short Stories, 1947) that "The Machine Stops is a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells" (although not all Wells's stories were optimistic about the future). The story could also be seen as a warning of the consequences of valuing virtual communities over direct experience (Wikipedia being an example of such a community). The final destruction shows Forster's belief that humanity can, and should, save itself from materialism and reconnect itself with nature.
Beneath the immediate concern with technology and consumerism, the story can also be seen as a coded description of Forster's personal life: he was a repressed homosexual, trapped inside a hostile society and longing to escape emotionally, just as Kuno is trapped inside the Machine and longs to escape physically. Perhaps this is why Forster chooses the word 'Homelessness', with its similarity to 'Homosexuality', as the ultimate taboo in his story. Forster indulged in a similar escape fantasy at the end of Maurice, when the two lovers run away from society to become outlaws.
The story predicted several scientific and social innovations, such as the 'cinemataphote' (television) and videoconferencing, and the Machine itself could be seen as an overgrown Internet that dominates mankind.
Television
According to the Internet Movie Database, an adaption of the story directed by Philip Saville was shown on television in the UK on 6th October 1966.
External Links
- Full online text of The Machine Stops (http://emforster.de/hypertext/template.php3?t=tms)
- Another online text (http://www.plexus.org/forster/index.html)
- Summary and commentary from NYU's Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db/webdocs/webdescrips/forster379-des-.html)