Writing

The Machine Stops would be prescient if it was published today, making it prophetic given its origin in 1909. Apparently, this was the season in which humanity gained consciousness. In the words of Virginia Woolf:

On or around December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered or a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that, but a change there was, nevertheless …

1909 was also the year the Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism was released and, perhaps fittingly, 1910 marks the end of the last nominate British Era: Edwardian England. In light of all that came before and was to come, things were getting weird.

The Machine Stops is about two persons, Vashti and her son Kuno, living in a globe-spanning fully automated city powered by ‘The Machine.’ Each person lives alone in a hexagonal room with all amenities provided by button. Their primary form of stimulus is viewing one another and the pursuit of “ideas” with which to give lectures. Forster believes that humanity will remain intellectual – Vashti is interested in musical history – but nevertheless remains pessimistic that this will provide deeper meaning. People pursue their niche interests (“the endless piling up of useless facts”) and become ever more alienated from the original vital sources of knowledge:

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.

Humanity has not merely become bloodlessly afraid of physical touch, exertion, natural air, light, and nature, but even the idea of these things unmediated and unfiltered by The Machine. These are the human blobs of Wall-E, the Eloi of The Time Machine , the sterile viewers of The Naked Sun: the last men of Zarathustra:

The opposite of the overman [Übermensch] is the last man: I created him at the same time with that. Everything superhuman appears to man as illness and madness. You have to be a sea to absorb a dirty stream without getting dirty. [Nietzsche, Fragments]

The addiction to comfort and the fear of unmediated touch manifest as the grotesque white “worms” of the Machine’s “Mending Apparatus” in The Machine Stops. The übermensch of the story, Kuno, is strong and willing to risk his own life to see outside the system. He wants to see the sun directly, to breathe the air, witness nature (which the Machine appears to exterminate routinely). He is a Romantic hero and longs for Wessex. He dreams of the pre-modern English knights, maidens, and farmers who experienced real life. Kuno’s modern avatars are Truman from the Truman Show and the eponymous THX-1138, both of whom would rather die than live in the cave of lies.

Over time, it becomes clear The Machine is causing atrophy in not merely the physical but the spiritual powers of mankind. They have lost control of their tools and the Central Committee – ever distant and unavailable – cannot prevent its disintegration. One day, Kuno announces “The Machine Will Stop” and soon after it begins to implode. Humanity is too weak to live outside once the machine stops supporting them and Vashti, Kuno, and the “moderns” all perish. The only glimmer of hope is the suggestion that people remain above, the “Homeless” who will inherit the Earth once again and will avoid our mistakes.

The central theme of The Machine Stops is the danger of comfort and the importance of the physical body. Kuno must rediscover notions like tiredness, “far” and “near”, pain, blood, and danger. He is the mouthpiece for the author’s red-blooded philosophy:

Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. Then I went further: it was then that I called to you for the first time, and you would not come.

The fear of comfort and the machine, the adulation of physical self-sufficiency and immediate experience: these are core themes of modernity and will be repeated so long as the gears spin. It exists in all debates about modern life: opposed by the radical UNABOMBER, explored in the dialogue of My Dinner With Andre, and depicted in the Last Children of Tokyo. Its purest, most honest form is in Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind where bodily experience, even in a toxic, broken, war-torn world, is preferred over a sterile and planned peace.

It will continue so long as we cannot say No. Modern people cannot give up modern conveniences, until they have to, and then inconvenience becomes normal once again. Aircon, central heating, modern transport, the varieties of food, immense leisure time, instant communication: without them I ask in all honesty, where would we be? Our attachment to them produces a Political Fact which all politicians must accede to, and which will fundamentally constrain any programme of reform, whether the Utopian-agricultural fantasy or the Communist worker’s paradise.