The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.
The futuristic, dystopian world of Forster’s The Machine Stops is set in a time when the planet is no longer habitable, meaning that humans are forced to live in air-ships and oxygen-controlled rooms in order to survive. Besides the unbreathable air, this fictional earth is not wholly different from the western world of today; people are isolated from one another for extended periods of time, the majority of communication occurs through digital means, everyone is consumed by technology and no one experiences anything beyond the online lectures, books and music projected into their small, individual rooms. Everything is centered towards convenience, comfort and leisure.
Vashanti is an average middle-aged woman deeply immersed in this technologically advanced lifestyle. She greatly admires and worships the Machine – the name given to the motherboard for all of the buttons and gadgets she uses on a daily basis – and has not left her personal room since childhood.
That is until the day her son Kuno calls, demanding that she meets with him face-to-face. She will have to leave her haven for the first time in a countless number of years…but will she sum up the courage? And what does he want to speak to her about that he can’t say over a video call? Who is he scared of listening in?
It’s astonishing to discover that this short story was written one hundred and four years ago. The technology described could be plausible inventions of the near future, and the proposed disadvantages of them mirror the sorts of issues discussed in recent times (i.e. children who play too many video games will have developmental problems, constant mobile phone use will cause damage etc). The story expertly depicts the negative connotations of decreased physical and mental stimulus and, frighteningly enough, the self-absorbed, aggressively self-gratifying attitude of the characters could arguably be seen as the growing mindset of people today.
What really blew me away was the fact that Forster perfectly defined the sorts of personality traits required to thrive in a machine-driven age. In the third part of the story, he writes
Then she broke down, for with the cessation of activity came an unexpected terror – silence. She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her – it did kill many thousands of people outright. Ever since her birth she had been surrounded by the steady hum.
How many of us would be agitated at the loss of the internet? What would we do if we couldn’t use a mobile, a television, a Kindle? We have grown so used to a constant barrage of devices designed to entertain and inform that living a day without one to hand seems oddly unnatural.
This is a great dystopian short story that perfectly epitomizes human nature. The fact that we humans don’t know when to stop surviving and bettering ourselves is both the essence of our being and a curse, and this is made all the more frightening if you consider that Forster recognised this flaw over a century ago. The rest of us really are slow on the uptake…
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