Wrote E.M. Forster, in 1909, in "The Machine Stops" (commission earned).
This was the book he wrote between "A Room with a View" and "Howards End," and it seems to presage the web, A.I., and social media. That seems odd, but my understanding is that he, like many others, was reacting to "A Modern Utopia" by H.G. Wells.
Here's a book I read a while back, "The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984." It tells the story:
Wells was proudest of A Modern Utopia, in which two men hiking in the Alps stumble into a parallel-universe Earth ruled by the Samurai, a puritanical caste of “voluntary noblemen.”...
As a teenager, Orwell was entranced by A Modern Utopia, but you would never guess that from his later writing about Wells. “We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish,” he wrote in 1943. “But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive.” Hitler, he thought, was proof of that. Instead of peace and pleasure, the Führer promised the German people “struggle, danger and death,” and they drank it up....
E. M. Forster, meanwhile, was moved to respond in the form of a short story. In 1909, between A Room With a View and Howards End, Forster published “The Machine Stops,” an enduringly brilliant “counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells.” The twentieth century filled him with dread, he wrote in his diary: “Science, instead of freeing man…is enslaving him to machines…God what a prospect! The little houses that I am used to will be swept away, the fields will stink of petrol, and the airships will shatter the stars.”
A complete novice in science fiction, Forster pilfered most of his futuristic ideas from books like A Modern Utopia, When the Sleeper Wakes and The First Men in the Moon, turning Wells’s imagination against him.
Pilfered!
The citizens of Forster’s subterranean future state live in a hi-tech cocoon where everything they need—light, air, food, water, music, company—is delivered by the holy Machine. Reduced to weak, pasty lumps by inactivity, they can deliver lectures and speak to their “several thousand” friends around the world via video: a premonition of YouTube, Skype and Facebook. Some airships remain in service, but few bother to use them because the Machine has made everywhere the same: “What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?”
At this point, I — a connoisseur of travel critique — add my "travel" tag to this post, in case I ever choose to write a book composed of pilfered ideas.
The more powerful the Machine becomes, the more people rely on it; the more they rely on it, the more powerful it becomes. Technology itself is the tyrant. “Progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.” Finally, mysteriously, the Machine begins to fail, but the people are too enslaved to protest. They tolerate the stinking bathwater and rotting artificial fruit until the terminal day when civilisation collapses....
Oh! Spoiler alert. Though that's just the spoiler in the title, isn't it?
I pile on some more good tags — "light and shade," "fascism," "hitler," "unwritten books," "bathtub," "smelly." Publish!
Button hit.
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16 (na) komento:
That’s a LOT to chew on over coffee. Interesting. The Machine became an oft used archetype in popular culture. Perhaps “AI” is the new “The Machine” archetype. If we accept that then Forster literally was ahead of his time. That’s amazing.
Ironically it is still the purview of actual humans to dream dreams like that and transcribe them for posterity and human imagination, that engine in our being that reflects the Maker of the universe and ourselves, will never be matched nor surpassed by soulless processing chips.
This hits in a lot of ways. I was just running Artcast on my TV and the artist was Winslow Homer, we almost don't seem to be the same species that he painted. We don't even let our cats live outdoors, risking the hawks and cars to catch the mice and birds, the way cats are supposed to live. Now we end up with overweight cats with no claws and diabetes. I had a friend living off campus in college whose cat was hit by a car, and he buried it in the backyard with a marker reading "Paid the price of freedom," and that always stuck with me.
Anyway. I am a low key fan of E.M. Forster, I have been discovering him in my dotage, bit by bit, so thanks for the heads up on another book.
More a story than a novel. It's true that Wells was enthusiastic about the scientific future, but his predictions also had a dark side. The Eloi of "The Time Machine" are people who get everything they need without having to work -- as if everything came from a machine. In reality it's the underground, brutish Morlocks who provide for them. Things didn't work out well for the Eloi or the Morlocks or humanity which devolved into them.
Wow, EM Forester really saw the future didnt he? I really like the line “What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?”
We're almost there in the USA. And almost every great city in Europe is full of the same type high class shops, the same tourist crowds, and the same "Diverse" populations. As "Jim" told Trump "paris isnt paris anymore".
I havent read many EM Forester short stories. Read his big 3 novels and loved two of them - Room with a view and Howards End.
Didn't care for "A Passage to India". Forester's heart was in the right place - attacking British Colonialism. But the Indians are just stick figures, and the story is a bore. It put me off reading Maurice - his "Secret Gay Novel". Once you put advocacy above all, art suffers.
Cautionary tales - I like them because they're like lighthouses, telling me what to avoid, but I don't like them because they can make me overreact and just stay at sea.
We leave for two months in Mexico in a couple of days - not Cabo or Cancun, but Guadalajara and Mexico City and San Miguel (and then, I admit, Ajijic, because I have a friend there); I know it'll be tempting to stick to La Condesa and such, but fortunately I'm married to man who is convinced that Pekin is not Shrewsbury and wants to experience the differences. He's bright me along on more than thirty years of his adventures and my life's been richer for it.
I noticed one thing that Forester forecast, books are disappearing from our local libraries. Not sure why but the shelves are half empty. Read somewhere that AI firms are buying up books by the millions, and destroying them after feeding them into the AI. True or false? I dunno.
In any case, interest in books, even the latest non-fiction best sellers seems to be dropping like a stone. Most people in my local library aren't looking at books or checking them out, they're sitting at the tables - looking at their computer screen.
Or checking out blue-rays.
"More a story than a novel."
I agree and refrained from calling it a novel (or even, as I've seen, a "novella"). I used "book" because it was sold as a single item on Amazon, not as part of a collection.
Basically, it's short. 34 pages on Kindle.
"Didn't care for "A Passage to India"..."
False allegation of rape — that's something we still struggle with.
@RCOCEAN : Yes, AI firms are bulk-buying pre-2015 and, particularly, pre-1976 books, bulk-scanning them by sawing off the spines, then shredding the pages afterwards. The last step is taken to put them on the right side of copyright law, believe it or not. Keeping the books after scanning them was deemed illegal copying by a court. Whereas, if you buy a used copy, scan it, then shred the book, you still only have one copy. (In a database, that you own, and access to which you will sell via an AI prompt, and share none of the proceeds with the copyright holders, but never mind all that.) It's the greatest theft/destruction of human knowledge in history, and everyone in charge is just fine with it.
Sometimes, more often I think than I realize, I read one of your posts and think, "This is a really great post." It's interesting, thought inducing, and backed by strong interesting comments. And many times I find I have nothing to add that would make this any better.
"As a teenager, Orwell was entranced by A Modern Utopia, but you would never guess that from his later writing about Wells."
I suppose everyone has a book or two like that. Top of my list would be Herman Hesse, Siddhartha or maybe the Glass Bead Game. Very popular in high school back then ('60s). No idea whether anyone reads that fluff anymore and I've never had any interest in going back to it.
"The more powerful the Machine becomes, the more people rely on it; the more they rely on it, the more powerful it becomes. Technology itself is the tyrant."
UniBomber said same thing.
I remember reading The Machine Stops in high school. As the decades have gone by, I think about it more often. If someone wants to delve into early science fiction, this is an important work of the genre.
I also like how Nicholas Meyer, in the 1979 movie, Time After Time, pokes H.G. Wells a bit about his future utopian ideal. It's so funny that H.G. Wells thinks that, by going to the future, he's going to "Utopia," And then we see his shock and disappointment when he emerges from the time machine in San Francisco in the year 1979.
IIRC, the Forster story is the kernel of the early Lucas film THX-1138.
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