The Machine Stops (E. M. Forster)

The Machine Stops
E. M. Forster
Oregan Publishing
Fiction, Sci-FI
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It has been many generations since humanity retreated from an uninhabitable surface to live in the depths of the Earth. Here, in their personal podlike rooms, the great Machine provides them with everything they could need or want: food, music, video entertainment, lectures to exchange ideas, contact with friends and family. It's rare that any leave, save when assigned to procreate or relocate to a new room. Vashti is content with this life, surely the pinnacle of human achievement, but her son Kuno grows restless. He wants to see his mother face to face - a needless frivolity. He wants to see the surface, even though there's nothing up there but simple plant life anymore. He even longs to look at the stars... with his own living eyes! Worst of all, he questions the Machine, insisting people are starting to worship it like a god, a line of thinking that could see him rendered "homeless" (sent to the poisoned air of the surface without a respirator to die). Vashti wants nothing to do with his heresies. She just wants to enjoy the luxuries of life as provided by the Machine - but every machine, even the greatest in human history, might skew from its original purpose... and might even someday break down.

REVIEW: This classic short story, a look at a dystopian future where humanity has lost sight of itself and become too enamored with its own creations to remember its place in the world and its true worth, was first published in 1909, and holds up reasonably well today, a clear inspiration to later writers. Vashti, like most "modern" people, has grown weak in will and body, impatient, intolerant, and even childish, every whim perpetually indulged at the press of a button, every idea regurgitated through numerous mouths and generations until original notions are ultimately abhorrent. Only for the sake of her son does she brave the airship trip to his room, where he unravels a tale of rebellion so scandalous she recoils in horror from his actions. Later, as the Machine ascends from mere creation to quasi-deity, she loses herself in worship to try to forget his heretical actions - until the mechanical god (as implied in the title, so not really a spoiler) begins breaking down. Forster projects a certain romanticism on the wilderness and "wild" men and women as the only true expression of humanity (and the only true way to know divinity, measuring the world against oneself and oneself against the world), eschewing the softening, sensory- and mind-dulling conveniences of civilization and industry (and conveniently glossing over questions of how people can ever survive a world as ecologically degraded as the one in the story). The message may be a bit heavy-handed, but the tragedy of Kuno's doomed rebellion against conformity, Vashti's embracing of society and willingness to be subsumed, and the ultimate reckoning of a failed civilization that has completely lost its way come through.

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