The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)

"Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously."

Prescient to the point of being creepy.

I love this story. (In fact, I even wrote and recorded a song based on it, from the perspective of Kuno).

I find the societal obsession with ideas fascinating. Especially this bit:

> In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, "No ideas here," and hid Greece behind a metal blind.

To think that the Earth could inspire nothing is just... sad.

An audiobook version is available for free here: https://librivox.org/the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster/

(librivox is a volunteer/non-professional project, so don't expect shakespearean acting, but it's good enough)

A classic. Some of the ideas presented here were literally a hundred years ahead of their time.

See: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20machine%20stops&sort=byP... (the many "The Machine Stops" entries on HN)

For anyone to whom the name E.M.Forster does not ring a bell,[1] he's more well known for "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India".

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster

First ran into this via Atul Gawande, who was recommended it by Oliver Sacks[1]

"I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/oliver-sacks

The BBC did a TV adaptation of this story in 1966 as part of its Out of the Unknown series.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060643/

The series was recently released on DVD:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-7-Disc-DVD-Terence-Morgan/dp/B00...

One of my favourite short stories. Impossibly visionary and also quite terrifying. There was a decent black and white British television adaptation that might still be somewhere on Youtube.

That was so far ahead of its time.

This was one of a series of stories re-published by Penguin for their 80th anniversary, as part of a series of shorts priced at 80p each. The Forster book had two stories (can't recall what the second one was, I've only read "the machine stops" so far).

http://www.littleblackclassics.com