The Machine Stops

There’s a certain kind of horror that doesn’t arrive with teeth or blood or a man in the dark—it arrives clean, efficient, helpful. It arrives as comfort. As optimization. As a system that works so well you forget what it replaced.

That’s The Machine Stops.

Written in 1909—before screens, before feeds, before we outsourced our attention piece by piece like we were shedding skin—E. M. Forster saw something coming. Not the specifics. Not the devices. But the posture. The quiet surrender.

This isn’t a long read. You can finish it in a sitting. But it doesn’t leave in a sitting.

It follows a world where humanity lives underground, each person sealed in their own room, tended to by an all-providing Machine. You don’t travel. show more You don’t touch. You don’t look someone in the eye and risk being seen. You press a button. You call it connection. You call it progress. You call it enough.

And maybe that’s the most unsettling part—no one in this world thinks they’re missing anything. The Machine has replaced the need to want.

Reading it now feels less like fiction and more like a mirror you didn’t ask for. Not a perfect reflection—but close enough to make you uncomfortable. The obsession with ideas over experience. The performance of intellect without the weight of living. The way convenience dulls something essential, slowly, politely, without resistance.

There’s a moment in the story where the system begins to fail—not all at once, not dramatically—but with small errors. Friction. Things not working quite right. And instead of questioning the Machine, they worship it harder. They double down.

That part sticks.

Because it’s easy to imagine collapse as loud, as obvious. But Forster understood something quieter: that decay often looks like loyalty.

This isn’t a book that tells you to throw your phone into the ocean or move into the woods and start again. It’s more precise than that. It just asks a question you won’t be able to ignore once it’s asked:

What have you handed over without noticing?

Read it if you want something quick. Read it if you want something that lingers. Read it if you suspect—somewhere under the routines and systems and optimized days—that there’s a part of you going quiet.

And maybe don’t read it on a screen. show less

“Beware of firsthand ideas!”

This is Forster's only foray into Sci Fi. Yes, that Forster--A Room With a View, A Passage to India, Merchant Ivory films--same guy.

I wouldn't call it his best writing style but his ideas are first rate Sci Fi. I'd even go so far to say it includes some never before broached "firsthand ideas." Originally published in 1909, before airplanes and TV, before even radio and telephones were in most homes, Forster saw enough new technologies, their unstoppable march, their impacts, and then wrote this creepily prescient short story, a peek into 2025.

Forster splendidly depicts how the modes of communication actually isolate and how the ease that we can receive goods will make us complacent and physically weak. show more The Machine is so complicated that no one truly understands it--it is an interconnected system headed by separate committees of departments.

Humanity has been so pampered for so long by the Machine, that people need not do anything, the primary pastime is thinking of "ideas." But even ideas have transformed from what we think of as ideas. The guiding philosophy is they should not be grounded in firsthand knowledge! Ideas are simply rehashing generations of thinkers, and each successive thinkers thoughts on the previous thinkers. Ideas are relative histories of ideas. Lectures covering history, kept within this concept, are popular entertainments.

Nature is abhorred, a mere necessary resource. That includes the natural human physical connection and the story has but two characters: a mother and son, the pair a sufficient example of the limited experiences available for human life with The Machine.

The Machine is not an evil entity. It's just technology humming along, one that we would recognize as having some AI adjacent abilities. Not sentient. Not extraterrestrial. Simply mankind's own man-made future.

"Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine."

Alexa, read out loud The Machine Stops. show less

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything."

“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. show more We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”

“Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.” show less

Pretty damn prescient on not only the idea of the Internet, but the consuming nature of it. Also a nicely ironic abstraction of 'ideas' from experience, which itself almost feels like a bit of foresight on the supposedly modern trend of 'fake news', subjective reality, the favouring of parroting other opinion and secondary research over primary research, and the reconstruction of facts through a lens of ideology (the ideology in this case being that of 'The Machine')

Guess our modern problems aren't so modern.

In the future Vashti lives, like everyone else on earth, in a small cell underground. The surface is not safe to inhabit, but everything she needs in life is provided for her by The Machine. She has fresher air than could ever exist naturally, full control of the temperature and lights, and can spend her days lecturing and watching lectures and talking to her friends (whom she never sees in person) on a video screen. Because no one ever experiences anything new, all of the lectures are just lectures about other lectures. Vashti visits her son in-person, at his request, who tells her that he has been outside and it is wonderful. She rejects what he tells her about life without The Machine, as she and others have started to worship The show more Machine. Eventually The Machine starts to fail, playing the usual background music out of tune and filling the rooms with smoggy air. The lights go out, but the inhabitants worship The Machine harder, arguing that it has always treated them well so they should just be happy with what they get, but to no avail.

Published in 1909, this is the only science fiction written by Forster, and it’s obviously quite prescient. How did he do it?? I feel particularly called-out by the lectures - I usually think of access to information as a clear positive to technology, but it does sometimes prevent you from touching grass.

The writing can be a little tedious so I’m not quite giving it 5 stars but wow! What a thing to read at this moment in time. This story is in the public domain in the United States, and can be read for free at https://archive.org/details/e.-m.-forster-the-machine-stops_202008 show less

Would you panic more at losing your wallet or your phone?

A few years ago, the question would be ridiculous, but now, it’s a tough call, and many of us fear losing our smartphone more, even with data synced in the cloud. Our world, and all our access to it, is there. I no longer know the phone numbers of my closest family.

We have outsourced our knowledge, and maybe ourselves, to our devices. Perhaps by recording my thoughts on this website, rather than trying to remember them in my head, I’m compounding that.

As machines become more human, will we become cyborgs, and then machines - or worse, irrelevant?

Update, January 2019: I was recently without a smartphone, and locked out of all data and apps for four weeks, and at a show more particularly difficult time. Sorting it out, and managing in the interim was far, far worse than the time my wallet was stolen.

Setup

This short story is told in three chapters. The first describes the situation, and has a hook as to what follows. The middle has someone questioning, and the third explores consequences.

The surface of the earth cannot support life, so everyone lives underground. Identical, solitary, sedentary lives, their every need provided by the Machine at the press of a button. People give and watch lectures, always on a quest for “ideas”, and ever grateful to the omnipotent and benevolent Machine. Each has their own Book of the Machine, with “instructions against every possible contingency”. That appeals to the technical writer in me.

Civilized people neither need nor want to be polluted by touch or smell. Contact with others is invariably by videocall, even between Vashti and her adult son, Kuno:
"‘Parents, duties of,’ said the book of the Machine, ‘cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483.’".

They have everything they need, but nothing that matters to being human.
“Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”
Do you have a soul when there’s so little opportunity for emotional engagement with anything, let alone anyone?

Only Connect

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."
From Howards End.

Like GoodReaders, the people in this story are hyperconnected: simultaneously always and never alone.

“She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”

Can one have meaningful friendships with so many? Can you even remember who’s who? Having so many connections surely dilutes the value of each one. Maybe hyperconnectivity makes us more isolated, despite the veneer of popularity?

Vashti has an isolation knob, mainly used when sleeping.
What if GoodReads capped friends at 500 instead of 5000?

Image: cover of Hawkwind’s concept album, The Machine Stops, from 2016
Title track (audio+video), A Solitary Man, HERE.

God in the Machine, or God IS the Machine?

Humans may have created the Machine, but now it bestows life, sustains life, and chooses when to allow life to end. Reverence, rituals, and liturgy accrue to the Machine, and to the Book of the Machine. Eventually, the Machine seems to believe as well, and to institutionalise and coerce that faith, gaslighting as it goes. Humans subjugate themselves to the Machine their forefathers made to serve them.

“We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries.”

I asked the same question about God and the Machine of Harlan Ellison’s 1967 story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (see my review HERE), last week. That also has people living underground, their lives controlled by an omnipotent computer, but in that, it’s the machine itself that usurps the mantle of God, and with very different consequences.

For a different and more comical slant on the apocalyptic danger of big brains, see Vonnegut's Galapagos, which I reviewed HERE.

Edwardian Sci-Fi

You can read it, free, HERE.

EM Forster wrote this staggeringly prescient short story in 1909, set a few hundred years in his future, though we’re almost there now. He was 30, had published A Room with a View the previous year, and would publish Howards End (see my review HERE) the year after. Queen Victoria had died only eight years earlier, and The Great War wouldn’t start for another five years. A world or three away from now, even allowing for the technological and industrial progress of his age. I almost wonder if he had access to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, as he describes things close to Skype, Spotify/streaming, MOOCs, online shopping, social media, virtual reality, and post-truth, fake news.

Quotes

• “Just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race.” Note, the anonymous narrator says “our race”.

• “I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.” Skype and virtual reality are not quite reality.

• “The [previous] civilization that had mistaken the functions of the [airship] system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.”

• “We have lost the sense of space... I determined to recover it, and I began by walking... and so did recapture the meaning of “Near” and “Far”... Man is the measure.”

• “Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia... that the Machine may progress eternally.”

• “On atavism the Machine can have no mercy.”

• "There will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality.”

Cartoon: Are we there yet?! (Source.)

Update, May 2020. Will Gompertz, BBC arts editor, thinks we're there. He writes about the specific parallels with Coronavirus Covid-19 lockdown, HERE. show less

Vashti lives, content, in an underground cell. All her needs are provided by the Machine. Then, one day, her son Kuno wants to see her in person.
Prescient? Written in 1909 about the follies of reliance on technology. Bone chilling.