The Machine Stops

"Don't waste time praying

Get on with finding"

 

Syntax - Pray

 

 

Dystopian fiction is one of the newest genres. For most of history, it would've been a largely meaningless concern. You lived and died by the dice roll of monarchic genetics, hoping the next inbred asswipe inheriting the throne wouldn't starve you to death. Only with the spread of popular mandates a century or two ago did the question of society's proper course gain moral and speculative heft. Only as industrialization moved much of the populace beyond subsistence farming and fragile shelter did awareness grow that more and more of what we call life is ruled by an increasingly convoluted network of production and distribution.

 

E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops ostensibly pins its plot to that second point. Like London's The Iron Heel, it counts among the genre's precursors yet is not much read or discussed these days. But where The Heel retains mostly just historical relevance, Forster's prose loses little of its emotional clout or its futurology. In fact, I found myself triple-checking its publication date in disbelief as to how little the intervening hundred and twenty years have dulled its vision. Indeed, the past couple of decades seem to have only increased its relevance.

 

It is overtly very technologically oriented for something from the turn of the previous century, on that point reading as written eighty years later, well into the computer age. Telecommunication, automation, the works. In fact the author seems to have done well not straining too hard at working out the technical underpinnings of devices he describes, but only focusing on the uses to which humans would put advanced technology. So on the topic of lifestyle choices, he somersaults past the 20th century altogether. Food delivery, individual habitation, social media obsession with "lectures" as stand-ins for forums and YouTube channels, even a sort of Wikipedia link-surfing fixation on the superficialities of history all exude an eerie Nostradamned-if-it-ain't-so feeling you get from the other dystopian greats like Fahrenheit 451 or 1984. The rapid-fired mass hysteria blurbs later on even sound suspiciously like hashtag mobs from 2010 onward.

 

Which is not to say I find myself too enchanted by its overall humanist theme. Of all its famous peers, The Machine Stops most closely matches the message of Brave New World, degeneration inherent in comfort, fear of losing TheHumanSpirit(tm) and hammers it home with the usual bluntness of SF:

"The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars." 

- to which my cynical self would reply: you make it sound like a bad thing! What is the body but the original, primordial Machine imprisoning consciousness by the demands of instinctive automation seeking nothing but genetic replication?

 

Yet still, ultimately the focus is not on the evils of technology, but on the inherently suicidal surrender of conscious self-guidance and control over society, a message that certainly rings true in the current age of incipient fascism and AI slop consumption. No reasonable reader can deny the book inspired future generations, regardless how few living today may have read or even heard of it. Like Capek's R.U.R., you find all the core ideas already represented; the following century's imitators have already illustrated each scene in a thousand hypostatic facets while rarely reaching past them. Like Arthur C. Clarke's general style, if you now experience little novelty in The Machine Stops' plot, premise or perceptions, I'd say it's because since 1909 it gradually became our very expectation of its subgenre.