The Machine Stops

An illustration of the power of imagination

Yesterday, I wrote about the critical role of imagination, whether looking backward into history or forward into the future. Today, I offer a powerful illustration of imagination.

It’s a science-fiction short story by E.M. Forster.

That may be a little surprising. You likely know E.M. Forster as the early 20th-century chronicler of gender and relationships (A Room With A View), class (Howards End), and colonialism (A Passage To India). Forster’s novels make for ravishing costume dramas. But they are not science fiction in the least.

And yet, immediately after writing A Room With a View and before writing Howards End, Forster crafted one of the truly great science-fiction stories.

The Machine Stops was published in 1909. To say that these were early days for science fiction is understatement. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had published what are now regarded as classics of the genre, but there wasn’t really a genre in 1909. Even the label “science fiction” was yet to be coined. (That came more than a decade later, courtesy of engineer and gadfly Hugo Gernsback, namesake of the “Hugo Award,” the top prize in science fiction today.)

Image by Dall-E using prompt “steampunk clock”

The Machine Stops is arresting from the opening sentence: “Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee.”

It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.

The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

“I suppose I must see who it is,” she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people. In certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: “Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes — for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on ‘Music during the Australian Period.’”

She touched her isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.

“Be quick!” she called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.”

As Forster deftly reveals in this brief opening, the woman inside this strange little room — we learn her name is “Vashti” and she is Kuno’s mother — is physically cut off from the outside world and yet she is anything but cut off socially. Vashti’s thousands of friends live all over the world and she talks with them constantly. And she doesn’t merely speak with them. She sees them — by looking into what Forster calls a “plate.”

But Zoom calls are only the beginning of the wonders in Vashti’s room.

There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all she cared for in the world.

Vashti is “white as a fungus” because she never leaves her subterranean cell, not even to feel the sun on her skin. She isn’t forbidden from visiting the surface. She simply doesn’t want to. All she wants in the world is available to her, with her array of buttons and the instruction manual that explains how to use them — a manual simply called “the Book of the Machine.”

Image by Dall-E using prompt “steampunk old woman”

I first read The Machine Stops when Covid was forcing so many of us to spend days, weeks, and even months at a stretch at home. We worked where we lived and filled innumerable hours with Zoom calls. We effortlessly summoned food and every imaginable sort of consumer good by pressing buttons. Needless to say, Forster’s story gave me chills.

Think about the world in 1909. In that era, telegraph networks spanned the globe, so information could be sent between cities — in Morse code — at what was then considered blinding speed. Telephones were commonplace in businesses and, increasingly, homes. Radio had been invented and was being used to send Morse code, mostly from ship to shore. Radio was also being used for “radio-telephones” that allowed people to send their voices over the air, but in 1909 this was far from reliable technology and was still a mostly useless novelty. A few scientists and dreamers also imagined that one day the “radio-telephone” would become “radio-television,” allowing both the voice and face of a speaker to be transmitted across vast distances.

To spin this into a vision of planet-spanning Zoom calls is damned impressive extrapolation. Much the same is true of Forster’s imagined systems satisfying every material want at the push of a button.

By 1909, industrialization and mechanization had appreciably raised living standards and were starting to deliver an abundance of cheap goods. The price of this prosperity was standardization. Goods came from central factories, not local craftsmen. Each item was like every other item. With information and goods spreading far and wide, there was a rising sense that the world was homogenizing. Forster extended these trend lines far into the future — to arrive at a world in which all work is done by machines that deliver material abundance so complete that all needs are satisfied, and everyone, everywhere, lives like everyone else.

But what would a world like this do to people? How would we change? This is where Forster is at his most daring.

Forster tells us there are networks of giant airships connecting cities but these are relics of an earlier age. In Vashti’s time, almost no one travels without pressing need.

What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would be all like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

As with Peking and Shrewsbury, so with shorter distances. Why even leave your room if all the other rooms are alike? In Forster’s future, people are constantly connected with each other, constantly talking, but they almost never meet. Physical proximity to other humans has become so rare that it is upsetting. Physical contact is vulgar and repulsive.

For Vashti and countless others, the physical world around them is of no interest. To disdain it is the essence of enlightenment.

All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

Alone in their cells, talking endlessly with others, people do not share experiences. They have no experiences to share. Instead, they talk about “ideas” — abstract thoughts about the thoughts of others. Vashti and others in her vast network are obsessed with collecting ideas — the further removed from direct experience the better.

“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of [the lecturers.] “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by life and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.”

This drift into thought ever-more disconnected from reality is what Vashti and the rest of humanity, having long since abandoned any sort of religion, now consider spiritual development. They believe they are higher, better people.

The serpent in this Eden turns out to be Kuno, Vashti’s son.

Kuno is curious about the physical world. He wants to learn more about it, but not through technology. He wants to experience it. He calls his mother and begs her to come to him. “I want to see you not through the Machine,” he pleads. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.” Despite her loathing of the world, Vashti gets into an air ship, pulls down the blind to avoid seeing anything of the world below, and goes to her son.

Kuno, we learn, has visited the surface and discovered that people can still live there. They do live there. People cut off from the global civilization in which Vashti is enmeshed. People living barbarously. With other people. Experiencing the world.

It has been 114 years since The Machine Stops was published so I doubt anyone would object if I spoil the plot. And, well, what happens is right there in the title, isn’t it?

But the plot isn’t my concern here. The imagination is.

Forster was apparently inspired by H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine, in which a traveller from Victorian England goes to the distant future and discovers humanity has bifurcated between a soft, childlike race (the Eloi) on the surface of the planet and nasty brutes below (the Morlocks). The Morlocks do all the work and satisfy all the needs of the docile Eloi because — plot spoiler! — the Eloi are the Morlocks’ food.

In Wells’s story, the Eloi are the descendants of the upper class; the Morlocks below are what became of the working class. Forster turned this into a meditation on technology and our relationship with it. Humanity isn’t enslaved by the Machine, in Forster’s telling. Humanity builds the Machine to serve itself. But we are served so well that we lose much of what makes us human, we gradually forget that the Machine is our tool, and we become as dependent on the Machine as the Eloi are on the Morlocks. Eventually, we worship the Machine. We have enslaved ourselves.

The Machine Stops was acclaimed when it was published and its reputation has only grown since, as each succeeding generation has found it even more relevant and provocative. As with most science fiction, The Machine Stops is not a prediction, only an exploration of what is possible given what is. That may seem a small thing. But the chills prove otherwise.