The Machine Stops (1909) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Machine Stops (1909) [pdf]

web.cs.ucdavis.edu

129 pointsanimal_spirits38 comments

It's interesting, to me, what prompted Forster to write this. From the "themes" section [1] of the Wikipedia page about the story:

In the preface to his Collected Short Stories (1947), Forster wrote that "'The Machine Stops' is a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells." In The Time Machine, Wells had pictured the childlike Eloi living the life of leisure of Greek gods whilst the working Morlocks lived underground and kept their whole idyllic existence going. In contrast to Wells' political commentary, Forster points to the technology itself as the ultimate controlling force.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops#Themes

This piece was well ahead of its time. I don't think I can claim with a straight face that it could be written today without change, of course, but I am comfortable saying that if someone told me this was written in the 1960s that I would have a hard time proving them wrong. And that's not something most stories from 1909 can say.

And the changes necessary to bring it up to date even today are not that great, honestly. For instance,

"By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press. The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound."

would need some tweaking. Today we could be even lazier and simply ask for these things, in voice.

But all in all, well ahead of its time.

In a world where old graphic manuals are reissued on Kickstarter and people buy hardcover books or vinyl just to have a beautiful functional object, what needs updating even there? I think it correctly notes that we tend to make new physical artifacts to retain experiences that have become disembodied and abstracted away from us.

Actually, it was the "button press" that I think is out of date, for much the same reason the original Enterprise bridge looks very silly nowadays. We don't need huge arrays of buttons like that anymore. We may still want a few physical ones, of course, just as we like physical volume and climate controls in our cars, but our 21st century Machine rooms would not have hundreds of buttons in them, but a touchscreen and voice interface. Even if we had a physical manual for it, which I'm totally comfortable with as a story choice.

You may have simply automatically upgraded the interface in your head, but I'm pretty sure the author was envisioning something more like the Enterprise bridge.

> We don't need huge arrays of buttons like that anymore.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Here's the bridge of a modern cruise ship (Quantum Of The Seas):

https://safety4sea.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Wartsila-i...

Quite a few buttons; that keyboard in the front right alone has at least 104 keys.

Another image of rows of buttons inside the control room of a nuclear submarine:

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/21/13/306D657A000005...

If anything, the number of buttons has gone up, not down over the course of the last century.

Airplane cockpit 100 years ago:

https://cdn.virily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4F5A8778_M...

Airplane cockpit today:

https://airbus-h.assetsadobe2.com/is/image/content/dam/produ...

Granted half of the buttons are for redundancy, that's still quite a lot of buttons.

For aircraft, Peak Button was reached at the end of the large propeller aircraft era. Here's the B-36 flight engineer's station. [1] The B-36 had 6 propellers and 4 jet engines. Most of those controls are for engine management of the reciprocating engines.

[1] http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-7.html

Touch screens simply suck if you need to interact with a device in rough conditions - high seas or turbulence.

That's a big reason why most serious transportation vessels still have lots of buttons. It's far easier to stabilize your hand on a panel and use a button or knob interface than to try and hit the right button while going from 0.5G to +1.5G and +/- 30 degrees of bank.

I was not making a generalized argument that everything should be touch screens. I was making the point that a Machine denizen if written in modern times would be using a touchscreen or voice interface. Or perhaps a keyboard, though that starts to get a bit more open ended than I think the idea is here.

Evidence, if not outright proof, is that is exactly what we have today in the prototype Machine we're living in. We do not interact with our Machine environments via an array of bespoke, single-purpose buttons.

You can also step up the sci-fi a bit and assert a brain-reading device.

However, as I was saying, it definitely dates the work to write as if a big array of buttons is how one would interact with the Machine. But I reiterate, all things considered, only a little. It still holds up brilliantly.

> We do not interact with our Machine environments via an array of bespoke, single-purpose buttons.

We don't? Every single light source in my house is controlled by a bespoke button or switch. I have buttons to control the burners on my stove, the temperature in my room, the music, etc. I have two buttons on my toilet and I select the appropriate flush mode based on context. I have a button I carry in my pocket to open my car which is full of buttons. At the parking garage a button raises the gate and gives me a ticket. Even the coke machine with a touchscreen has a dedicated button to dispense liquid.

I have in my files a sci-fi novella written by my grandfather 100 years ago, in which by 1980 a megalomaniacal scientist has stopped up the Gulf Stream in order to plunge Europe into a new Ice Age in revenge for not respecting his genius. (I'll publish it once I get around to registering the copyright.)

It's remarkably prescient and timely now in its environmental concerns – but Pop didn't predict the success of the helicopter, so the villain is delivered to a Congressional hearing (in Washington, Missouri, whence the US capitol was moved in 1975) by a very weird VTOL hybrid airplane-balloon-helicopter:

"One by one the three retardiers ballooned above the plane like white puffs of smoke; now only the hissing of air around the struts was heard. Then the sudden whirr of the helicoptic blade and the LL-2X1 settled feather-light into her berth."

That novella sounds fun.

At the risk of nit-picking, if the work was written more that 100 years ago, then the copyright has almost certainly already expired (barring some quite rare circumstances).

Nothing preventing you from publishing it, and a useful forward or other newly written content would, of course, be automatically copyrighted (copyrights, at least in the US, only need to be "registered" if you want to sue someone :-)

If it's not been published, then why would it not be copyrightable now? I don't understand. Who knows when it was first written? Is that even important?

I would love the advice of a copyright attorney about this! It was never published, so under current US copyright law https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/303 I think it is protected until 70 years after Pop's death in 1983. But I guess we'll find out for sure in a few months – I just submitted a registration application ツ

I'm a long way from a (copyright) attorney, so I really don't know what I'm talking about on the finer points.

In general, of course, the act of creating is what currently confers copyright. So if you write some code, for example, you automatically hold the copyright. No need to do anything official or call a lawyer.

But you're correct that there are exceptions for older works that were never published or formally registered under the old (pre-1978 system). So yup, my (pretty much worthless) opinion agrees with your reading that it would be 70 years after 1983. And who knows, the Mighty Mouse might might well rise up again as 2024 approaches (the current date when Mickey Mouse will otherwise enter the public domain).

But

PS. floathub.com is brilliant!

I had read this awhile back. I was taken aback by the 1909 date in the title - I had assumed it was ‘30s or ‘40s. So I verified it in Wikipedia.

There are periodic waves of fear that the machine will, in fact, stop. The machine being an immeasurably complex global network of just-in-time delivery, high efficiency (but not necessarily sustainable) food production and so on. That once broken, this system may not be easily restarted, at least quickly enough to prevent disaster.

Y2K and COVID being the most recent such waves. Probably this is why this old short story still resonates so strongly.

A solar flare or a coronal mass ejection that hits Earth would be catastrophically bad.

> That once broken, this system may not be easily restarted, at least quickly enough to prevent disaster.

This is quite literally what we're seeing with currently supply chain shortages, food shortages, etc. The machine breaking down.

It turns out, it cannot be easily stopped and restarted.

So far so good? At least here in the West, other than a short panic of "We're going to run out of forests that they felled that we need to wipe shit from our asses!".

But maybe things are falling apart in the background, with things like global shipping insanity, and food price hikes http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/ . But cable news is busy talking about the things cable news talk about.

I like this occurrence of essentially modern FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out...

  “But why do you not come to me instead?”
  “Because I cannot leave this place.”
  “Why?”
  “Because, any moment, something tremendous many happen.”

This book started my love of Science Fiction. My English teacher gave it to me when I was about 13. I wasn't very focused in school, but I fell in love with this book. My teacher obviously knew me well, it was short, but very well written. Thank you teacher.

If you prefer to listen rather than read, there are free librivox recordings of this story: https://archive.org/search.php?query=the+machine+stops&and[]... and there is also an audiobook version you can find on Audible etc.

Big fan of this book. It's incredibly forward-thinking and can be read in an evening. Absolutely recommended if you have not read it.

The Beeb made the story into an episode of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Unknown] aired on Oct 6, 1966. Was once online somewhere (having no luck today.)

Every time I hear of Machine Stops, I think of Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(sh...] For me both of these fellas capture something of the H.G. Wells atmosphere, tinged with sadness.

There was an excellent production of this at York's (UK) Theatre some years ago. If you can find a recording (they released a performance on youtube during the pandemic though I don't know if that is still available, legitimately or otherwise) I recommend trying it.

I went thinking “this isn't going to work on stage without major changes” but was pleasantly surprised.

“The tunnels, of course, were lighted. Everything is light, artificial light; darkness is the exception. So when I saw a black gap in the tiles, I knew that it was an exception, and rejoiced.

-Malcolm X, probably. (Please don't mistake my jauntiness for thoughtlessness.)

An addendum: 1909 would have been when Picasso was in his African Period, and 10 years after the publishing of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which both presaged French negrophilie and common early-century European attitudes towards Africans - specifically, as representing closer human proximity to nature and passion, and identifying black iconography (from manufactured works like sculpture and dance to the literal absence of light) with such. I wouldn't be surprised if Forster had encountered such sentiments and been influenced by them, for better or worse.

I was hoping someone would repost this.

Saw it a while back and couldn’t remember enough to search for it. Thanks

Past related threads - mostly but not all about this story:

The Machine Stops: Science and Its Limits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234104 - Feb 2021 (14 comments)

Forster in Cambridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960924 - July 2020 (2 comments)

E. M. Forster, The Art of Fiction No. 1 (1953) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264355 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)

The Machine Stops (1909) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 - July 2019 (17 comments)

The Machine Stops (1909) Is an Omen for Our Technological Age - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215311 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

The Machine Stops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19125021 - Feb 2019 (3 comments)

The Machine Stops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124608 - Feb 2019 (29 comments)

What I Believe, by E.M. Forster (1938) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874412 - Jan 2016 (4 comments)

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 - Nov 2015 (17 comments)

The Machine Stops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256 - May 2015 (26 comments)

The Machine Stops (1909) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 - April 2014 (24 comments)

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041305 - Jan 2013 (1 comment)

(This Day in Tech) Nov. 1, 1909: ‘The Machine Stops’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856254 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)

The Machine Stops : E.M. Forster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114384 - Feb 2010 (1 comment)

Classic, this is a story that will always stick with you. City of Ember is also thematically similar, it's a fun movie.

I re-read this earlier this year and it really holds up. The lectures shared worldwide is basically how I use YouTube.

And all it took was one rogue nation torpedoing oil-rigs with autonomous drones?

The Machine is a powerful metaphor for government: a human creation which we made to serve us, and to which we have granted power beyond the bound of wisdom. It has grown beyond our understanding and control, and it would allow us to die if it could persist without us. When we are no longer able to maintain its vastness, many will perish with it.

The same thing could be said about the Internet, or tech in general.

Any technology; society, language... But I think, at its heart, it's a general metaphor for overreliance, materially, physically, psychologically, philosophically, and so on. It's a little stilted, in that it takes the complete and whole human body to be the irreducible quantum of man's existence, which it isn't, in either direction: people live full and happy lives with missing limbs or cognitive shortcomings, and even the healthiest man will have grave and brutal difficulties living on his own for an extended period. "People" are made up of colonies of varying types of cells (both genetically related to the whole and not), and necessarily make up communities that only can continue to exist through symbiosis. I would take that the actualization of the individual (as many individuals as possible) is the crux around which everything else swings, but the murkiness of the state of our evolution through the cosmos makes it difficult to pass judgment at any juncture. Perhaps the Machine and its collapse is what allows for the Pearl Mist People to carry on humanity without the threat of full and total Venusification of the planet.

I feel like there's an ancient Chinese parable about this...

I see The Machine is as a metaphor for the intermingling of Government, Family, Religion, Technology, and Business. Those systems are the only things powerful enough to keep the others in check, using each of their specific monopolies. When they stop competing, there is nothing left to prevent individual people from getting steamrolled.

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