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A review by iothemoon
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
3.0
A 1909 science fiction novelette by an author who is much better known for A Room with a View and other non-SF titles. Although this seems to be an outlier in the E. M. Forster canon, it is an impressive piece of futuristic forethought.
In the world of The Machine Stops, humanity lives in massive apartment complexes underground, where they can control the atmosphere and shield themselves from the inhospitable air above ground. People appear to value a certain kind of purity very highly - namely, the purity of a self that is unpolluted by contact with the world outside one's apartment.
One marvels at the prophetic prowess that this short work seems to possess. Many aspects of the world Forster imagines here really do invoke the information-age society. You can draw parallels between The Machine Stops and the pseudo-socialization of social media, zoom fatigue, the potential pitfalls of working from home, being removed from the reality of fighting for survival, international air travel, and more.
Here's the part of the novelette that spoke to me the most. Forster's humanity loves to find and acquire new ideas - and not just any ideas, but "second-hand", or better yet, "tenth-hand" ideas. You don't want to learn about the French Revolution and form your own ideas based on primary sources. Instead, you want to learn what experts say about the event - or rather, what judgements later commentators have to proclaim over the historians' analysis. Layers and layers of the analyses of previous analyses build up, and in the meantime the reality of what actually happened in France during the Revolution is dissolved by a game of broken telephone.
There's an undercurrent of authoritarianism in this society - Forster invokes religion, which apparently is both dead and very much alive in this future world. This is where the novelette's weaknesses start to come out. Because Forster packs a lot into a very short space, The Machine Stops reads more like an outline for a novel than a piece that stands on its own two legs.
Perhaps because of the limited space, I didn't feel immersed in the world of Forster's imagination. Instead, it felt like a list of genuinely impressive ideas that were glued together with dialogue. As Paul Hollywood once said, the flavors are good, but it's underbaked.
In the world of The Machine Stops, humanity lives in massive apartment complexes underground, where they can control the atmosphere and shield themselves from the inhospitable air above ground. People appear to value a certain kind of purity very highly - namely, the purity of a self that is unpolluted by contact with the world outside one's apartment.
One marvels at the prophetic prowess that this short work seems to possess. Many aspects of the world Forster imagines here really do invoke the information-age society. You can draw parallels between The Machine Stops and the pseudo-socialization of social media, zoom fatigue, the potential pitfalls of working from home, being removed from the reality of fighting for survival, international air travel, and more.
Here's the part of the novelette that spoke to me the most. Forster's humanity loves to find and acquire new ideas - and not just any ideas, but "second-hand", or better yet, "tenth-hand" ideas. You don't want to learn about the French Revolution and form your own ideas based on primary sources. Instead, you want to learn what experts say about the event - or rather, what judgements later commentators have to proclaim over the historians' analysis. Layers and layers of the analyses of previous analyses build up, and in the meantime the reality of what actually happened in France during the Revolution is dissolved by a game of broken telephone.
There's an undercurrent of authoritarianism in this society - Forster invokes religion, which apparently is both dead and very much alive in this future world. This is where the novelette's weaknesses start to come out. Because Forster packs a lot into a very short space, The Machine Stops reads more like an outline for a novel than a piece that stands on its own two legs.
Perhaps because of the limited space, I didn't feel immersed in the world of Forster's imagination. Instead, it felt like a list of genuinely impressive ideas that were glued together with dialogue. As Paul Hollywood once said, the flavors are good, but it's underbaked.