Morgan's Machine

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I first read "The Machine Stops" about 45 years ago (download here). Edward Morgan Forster was born in 1879 and published "The Machine Stops" in 1909. As a school boy, I read The Life to Come and Other Stories (1972) and wrote a term paper for my high school English class about themes in Forster's short stories. Sadly, I did not keep the paper that I wrote. What I remember most clearly from the 1970s about my reaction to Forster's work was being amused by the homoerotic themes that he included in some of his stories.

I like to watch.

Science Fiction

I seldom stray very far away from science fiction in this blog. Is "The Machine Stops" a science fiction story? It is easier for me to categorize "The Machine Stops" as fantasy or Scientific Romance (as is suggested here) or, possibly, social/political commentary in the same general category as Gulliver's Travels or "Micromégas". 

It is not easy to find much future science in "The Machine Stops". 🙁 Forster assures his readers that in the futuristic setting of his story, almost the entire human population of the world does little more than sit alone in their small rooms and chat with friends by videophone. I don't find Forster's version of such a future any more compelling than that of Isaac Asimov in his depiction of anti-social Solarians or John MacDonald's "Watchers" on his World of the Dreamers. 

 

dreamers

Humans are social mammals, and so what is the point of imagining a future dystopia where people are deprived of human-human contact? Are readers then supposed to be surprised when that dystopia collapses?

In my view, a writer of science fiction who depicts a future human society is obligated to help his readers to understand how future technological advances might get us from the world as we know it (here in the present) to the fictional world depicted in the story. When I am left feeling that the writer's imagined future is nothing but a silly fantasy and a future that could never actually arise, then I'm not going to feel comfortable calling the story science fiction.

 

in the Ekcolir Reality

     Morgan's Machine

What is the Machine? It is a world-spanning mechanical system that humans experience from within their monolithic underground cities, rather like bee hives, where the Machine provides people with air, water, electric lights, videophone service and manufactured food. The city people simply sit by themselves in their small rooms all day, pushing buttons to activate the Machine and have it provide for their needs. The only good thing about this absurd dystopia is that simply because of the story's title we know that the Machine is doomed. Maybe in an alternate Reality, the story had a different title.

"there were buttons and switches everywhere"

What bothers me most about Morgan's imaginary Machine of the future is that it has worked very well for a long period of time then, magically, it stops working. There is no attempt to explain how the Machine was created, how it worked or why it broke. Of course, if you are not playing the science fiction "what if?" game, then none of that matters.

Fifty years after publication of "The Machine Stops", Jack Vance published a story called "Dodkin's Job". It is easy for us to imagine that computers would have been needed for Forster's world of the Machine to be possible. 

 

push-button world

Vance had the huge advantage of living after the invention of programmable computing machines. Vance's imagined setting for "Dodkin's Job" can be viewed as a possible path towards Forster's future world of the Machine. I wonder if Forster ever read "Dodkin's Job".

 

Some people claim that "The Machine Stops" is prophetic, having anticipated the internet. However, to know which buttons to push while sitting in their rooms, everyone has a printed instruction book. In Forster's imagined future, the sound barrier has apparently never been broken.

a telephone exchange in England around 1904

Future Technology

In 1909, the telephone system in England was being consolidated into a unified national network. Originally, each city had its own phone company for local calls. As telephony technology improved, trunk lines connected cites and nations. 

 

In 1909, most homes did not have a phone, but it was not hard to imagine a future time in which everyone would be linked by telephone service.

1909

In 1908, Wilbur Wright demonstrated his airplane in Europe. In 1909, Louis Blériot won a prize for his flight across the English Channel. It is no surprise that Forster wrote about future aviation, including a flight over the Himalayan mountains, but his 'prediction' that passenger flights would never be able to move as fast as the Earth rotates was wrong (see Concord).

Science fiction is not about prediction, so I offer no complaints about the imagined future technology in Forster's "The Machine Stops". I liked "The Machine Stops" enough when I first read it (in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume IIB) to seek out addition stories that had been written by Forster. Forster helped teach me that science fiction did not really exist as a literary genre until some time after World War I. However, I'm glad I explored some of Forster's writings because he could certainly think outside of conventional boundaries, often writing what might be called "supernatural fiction".

 

cover art by Malcolm Smith

As silly as it was in 1909 to imagine people living in underground cubicles, never discount the possibility that some writer will find a way to make a bad idea even worse. After rocketry was discovered and the possibility of rocket-powered space travel was being taken seriously by fiction writers, we were invited to contemplate what it might be like to live in an orbit (Rog Phillips: "Live in an Orbit and Love It!"). Yes, imagine living your life in that small blue space pod (image to the left).

A better story by Phillips: "Love My Robot".

 

Related Reading: "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin and also more speculative fiction and future politics

Next: "The Alastor Network".

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