I was pretty surprised when I discovered E M Forster wrote a science fiction novella, The Machine Stops. I think of Forster as class and manners novels, so I was very interested to see how he imagined the scifi future. 

In the future, a Machine keeps all humans cared for, freeing them up for a life of ideas. Humans live in little honeycomb cells underground,  with no need to leave their rooms since the Machine brings food, entertainments, social connections, a bed, a bath, and everything else directly to them. This is written over a century before the pandemic, but cube life felt very 2020 to me. 

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.

Obviously, Forster is telling us that this is the bad place, but…. this future doesn’t seem too bad. Total leisure to pursue interesting ideas?  I’d prefer to write rather than give the sort of 10-minute audio lectures that Vashti and her friends do, but that’s a minor preference. 

We readers must be supposed to look down on Vashti, since she’s given a lot of unattractive physical traits (pasty white, hairless, toothless), and she does terrible things for any female fictional character to do (like telling her son she doesn’t have time for him). There’s a moment when Vashti reconnects with her online friends after going Do Not Disturb for a talk with Kuno, and Forster accurately predicted the buildup of messages in those few minutes.  On some levels, Vashti is the first person who needs to go touch grass. 

Kuno, her son, is dissatisfied and believes that the Machine keeping everyone fed, clothed, entertained, etc. is breaking down. This is ridiculous to Vashti (and, we readers assume, to the rest of the population) He has an adventure story, which works to highlight the difference between the world of the Machine and our world, since the goal of his quest is  experiencing grass and sunshine.  He crawls through abandoned tunnels to reach the surface, since people don’t go to the surface any more and there’s no tourist route to seeing the world.  We aren’t told directly what’s happened to the atmosphere, only that if one wants to visit the surface (for whatever strange reason, it’s definitely not popular or encouraged), a respirator is needed.

I found it particularly interesting that the aboveground world is green. This isn’t a post-nuclear desert or a burned-out cyberpunk trash city, it’s just empty nature. Even though there’s something wrong with the atmosphere, Kuno’s able to enjoy the rolling hills and mist of Wessex. He knows it’s Wessex, and a bit about the flora and history of Wessex from lectures, and he’s moved not just by the natural beauty but by the sense of British history. 

It was also interesting that even in this future, there’s a servant class.  There’s a girl operating the airship, and I was so curious how that would work. Not the airship, I mean, that obviously works by future tech. But how does a job work here? How do some people get a life of hobbies in the honeycomb, while other people have service jobs? What do you pay a worker when everyone already has whatever they want? I’ve read other Forster novels, and he’s very aware of social class, so I’m sure he must have thought about it, too. The girl working the airship is never explained, and it’s really the only time I wanted more explanation. I liked that the story wasn’t too bogged down in how the Machine came to be and who built it. Since it’s enough for Vashti, Kuno, and the rest of the world to know that the Machine was build by humans years ago, it’s enough for me, too. And I don’t usually go into specfic looking for a technical explanation anyway, But, a world of leisure with a couple pilots and stewards still working? Written by an author of class and manners novels? Please tell me how! 

The Machine Stops is a solid specfic story, with a strange but believable world.  There’s a intriguing vibe in reading older scifi, as real-life tech has caught up with what the author experienced and imagined, and it’s even stronger with such an old book. It’s interesting to see how Forster imagined the isolation of the Machine, and see it both through his era and ours. 

Even with all the now-dated future tech, The Machine Stops makes a realistic and understandable story about the young generation clashing with the older generation. Kuno’s desire to be understood by his mother powers a lot of his actions, and it’s a relatable desire in any setting. Vashti believes her son just doesn’t understand the way the world works, and that this is the way things have always been, and there’s no expectation of any change. She doesn’t hear what he he says, like a certain generational group does now, sure that any problems are only foolish young people and $5 lattes, and not an entirely collapsing economic system.  Kuno doesn’t actually say ok boomer, but he eventually gives up trying to explain to her that their shared world is coming unglued.