The Machine Stops

publish #mediareview Related to Musings on philosophy.

A short sci-fi story by E. M. Forster published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909.

PDF: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf

Summary

• The story takes place in the distant future.
• Humans live in their own personal rooms, which interface with the highly advanced “Machine” to tend to all their physical needs.
• The sensuous reptile brain is always satisfied.
• Humans enjoy sharing second-hand “ideas” with each other. That’s a common word used in criticism: “There are no ideas here”.
• Humanity is fragile because of this.
• The story is told from the perspective of a mother, Vashti.
• She is emotionally frail and afraid of “direct experience”.
• Her son, Kuno, verbally coerces her to travel on an airship to meet him.
• Now together in person, Kuno recounts his daring experience of leaving the sanctuary of the Machine.
• Kuno nearly died outside the Machine and was rescued via some unclear means.
• As a consequence of Kuno’s trespass, he has been sentenced to “Homelessness” - in other words death by exile to the Earth’s surface without a life-preserving respirator.
• The pair’s conversation alludes to the Great Revolution, whose members “perished for our edification”.

My thoughts

Refreshingly, there are no political motives to unpack here as the story was written in 1909.

Forster is remarkably prescient in his criticism of the modern pseudo-intellectual. Vashti is experientially bankrupt. Yet she feels comfortable giving a 10 min lecture about “music during the Australian period”. I can’t really tell if she enjoys it. But she gets some kicks out of recycling second hand ideas and espousing them from an authoritative position. (The lecture length is another fun jab.)