The Machine Stops

I came across E. M. Forster's novella, “The Machine Stops,” while looking for short titles my library could offer to help achieve my 2020 reading goal.

“A Room With A View” is in my top 50 books and was published in 1908, one year before “The Machine Stops.” In 1910, Forster published “Howard's End.” This novella, one of a future time and which humanity is generally isolated physically, while being connected via something like the Internet, lives underground after prior generations had contaminated the planet's upper surface. Forster's vision of the world in this book is all-too-familiar to those of us in pandemic 2020.

A major theme in this forward-looking work is humanism. Humans become reliant on and then deify The Machine, going so far as to forget that The Machine was created by man and eventually stops because man has forgotten how to tend to it. At its heart, characters like Kuno, who question single-/close-minded worship and who value personal connections, are the heroes.

It was very interesting to read this book not long after H. G. Wells' “The Time Machine;” some of the themes around colonialism, class, and humanism up here and both books, although in different ways.