Nov. 1, 1909: 'The Machine Stops'

__1909: __ E.M. Forster publishes "The Machine Stops," a chilling tale of a futuristic information-oriented society that grinds to a bloody halt, literally. Some aspects of the story no longer seem so distant in the future.

"The Machine Stops" appeared in the November issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Review. At 12,000-plus words, it's sometimes called a longish short story, sometimes a novella. Forster is not thought of as a science-fiction writer, but this piece appeared right between his third and fourth novels, A Room With a View (1908) and Howards End (1910).

The people in Forster's future live alone in small podlike rooms in a honeycomb of vast, multilayered underground cities spread across the globe. The physical comforts of food, clothing and shelter are all taken care of by the global and revered Machine, along with numerous opportunities for one-to-one and one-to-many electronic communication, in real time with voice and pictures.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere -- buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

The telephone was no longer a novelty in 1909, but radio was still its infancy, television was a mere dream, and we've only just gotten to point-to-point videoconferencing in our own time.

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Forster's future-dwellers are not without their anxieties, especially when dealing with the prospect of non-virtual meetings: "People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine."

Each pod comes with an instruction manual, the Book of the Machine. It is the only book: All other info is electronic, and the forests, Forster explains, "had been destroyed during the literature epoch for the purpose of making newspaper pulp." The Book not only instructs which button to push when, but alleviates the trepidations of life in the Machine:

Vashti was afraid.

"O Machine!" she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was comforted.

That the comfort is of a religious nature is revealed in this exchange between Vashti (who was reluctantly making a journey by airship) and other passengers.

"How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!"

"How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!" said Vashti.

"How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!" echoed the passenger who had dropped his Book the night before, and who was standing in the passage.

Vashti's son is a critic of life underground and virtual communication:

"You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say 'space is annihilated,' but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves."

He makes illegal trips to the surface, where even scholarly research is forbidden. Experts are expected to do research by re-digesting what they can already learn from the vast archives of the machine, getting their results from some proto-Google:

And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first-hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them.

The same lecturer continues, in a chilling premonition of the George W. Bush administration's derogation of "the reality-based community":

"And in time" -- his voice rose -- "there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colorless."

But the quality of life is not getting better. The music is losing fidelity. The air is not as fresh as it should be. The water has a ... smell.

The fly in the ointment is that the device that's supposed to remove flies from the ointment has more than a few bugs itself:

But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward, and allayed the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair.

And what happens in a self-repairing system when what needs repair chronically exceeds the repair capacity? What happens, we should ask, when that happens in a global system?

Vashti is horrified when she looks outside her cubicle in the final days:

For the tunnel was full of people -- she was almost the last in that city to have taken alarm.

People at any time repelled her, and these were nightmares from her worst dreams. People were crawling about, people were screaming, whimpering, gasping for breath, touching each other, vanishing in the dark, and ever and anon being pushed off the platform on to the live rail. Some were fighting round the electric bells, trying to summon trains which could not be summoned. Others were yelling for Euthanasia or for respirators, or blaspheming the Machine. Others stood at the doors of their cells fearing, like herself, either to stop in them or to leave them....

She closed the door again and sat down to wait for the end. The disintegration went on, accompanied by horrible cracks and rumbling. The valves that restrained the Medical Apparatus must have weakened, for it ruptured and hung hideously from the ceiling. The floor heaved and fell and flung her from the chair. A tube oozed towards her serpent fashion. And at last the final horror approached -- light began to ebb, and she knew that civilization's long day was closing.

She whirled around, praying to be saved from this, at any rate, kissing the Book, pressing button after button....

An airship ... crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

And you thought Halloween was scary.

Source: Various