The Machine Stops (1909) | Hacker News Reader

The Machine Stops (1909)

archive.ncsa.illinois.edu

127 pointsmo24 comments

This is one of the greatest and most influential short stories ever. I remember in college we had long debates about how the machine is the equivalent of what Facebook would be if "the machine stops" (i.e. social networking suddenly shuts down).

Here are a couple worthwhile things to note about this: - E.M. Forster wrote this in 1909, before there were even televisions. He essentially predicted humanity's future obsession with screens long before anyone else did, and even predicted the advent of video chat. - He predicted that humanity would become increasingly isolated and disconnected from the regular world, to the extreme that they literally must live underground. - He predicted that those who controlled the machine would act in malevolence (this is, to some extent, true today)

In the end, it's just a perspective on a dystopian future, somewhat like Ayn Rand's Anthem. Although people tend to have quite polarized views in this area, everyone can appreciate the quality of writing and clarity of purpose in The Machine Stops.

Forster regarded personal friendship as being of supreme importance, famously saying:

'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country'

And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the spam email and the blog and YouTube comments, so with in-app advertising, so with cloud server user tracking, so with clueless legislation. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged.

"No ideas here," murmured jodrellblank, and hid the discussion thread by clicking back to the frontpage.

OMIGOSH!

This story was in a sci-fi compendium that my Dad had. It made a huge impression on me what I was about 12 years old. I must have read it at least 3 times.

At that time, the name of the author (E. M. Forster) meant nothing to me, and I had no idea just how early (1909) the story was in the history of science fiction.

In a way, the fact that it's so early means this work has aged better than more recent works. An author in, say, the 1970s, would look at the technology around him, and base his version of The Machine on that. But in E.M. Forster's time it just didn't exist (apart from the airships) so he had to use his imagination.

While we are on the topic of great sf shorts:

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: http://users.pop.umn.edu/~matt0350/images/forumcrap/october/...

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

The Last Question: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

This one _blew my mind_ as a kid. I probably squealed with delight when I finished it.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/efi/friendship_is_optimal_a_my_littl... And then there's this, which is arguably MoPI done slightly better. Except it contains pony, so some people may have a problem with it.

From the same corner of the Internet, http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

One of the craziest (in a good sense) scifi stories I ever read.

Warning: the latter is X-rated in approximately every other chapter for just about every possible reason. Violence, sex, gore, combinations of the above.

Mind, I read the thing when I was 12 years old.

A Pail of Air: http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6...

A Walk in the Sun: http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1...

This is a short book I recommend to everyone. 70 pages, 1909 and it still feels futuristic. He predicts commercial flight, the internet (Spotify, Skype, podcasting). Remember that this is before the popularization of radio.

The beauty of his language is in the abstract representations of technology. This is what makes the ideas behind it continually relevant and futuristic to this day.

The most philosophically profound ideas in it presage Baudrillard's conception of hyperreality.

Should be required reading of every single startup person, period. Well, every person in the world, period. It describes our future pretty well. Stay calm and continue chatting on Secret or WhatsApp, nothing to see here.

The BBC's 1960's TV version of this story is on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrGUnIFuRs

There is another element within the story that I think people overlook.

Most people seem to focus on the Machine stopping, and that because of this, the humans dwelling within it perish.

More importantly, why did the Machine stop? It stopped because the people within it lost the science, engineering, materials, maths, and physics knowledge it took to build the Machine in the first place - the Machine appears to have bred that desire for such knowledge out of them. In effect, the Machine killed itself by removing the humanity from Humanity.

Most people seem to focus on the Machine stopping

I think the more miserable dystopian part of it is that the people inside the machine don't seem to do much, have no purpose, no future, even if the machine works perfectly.

That seems to reflect my experience of the present day, in a much more unsettling way than the idea that "someday it might all fall apart".

And interestingly, "the horror of direct experience" and the references to the interaction with the air stewardess - the sort of things you might have a therapist or self-help guru to work on today - there's no mention that those are even recognized as problems, not things The Machine can help with or is trying to help with. While Vashti is having ideas and lecturing on music, she's blunt and cruel to people, even her son, she's preoccupied with keeping up appearances ("that's not mechanical, you can't say/do that") and afraid of being seen taking comfort from the instruction manual, something presumably a large number of people also do.

Do these sort of things automatically follow from the idea of "setting a story in a technological future", and why?

>> Do these sort of things automatically follow from the idea of "setting a story in a technological future", and why?

Not necessarily - Iain M. Banks' Culture series is a good example, where the Culture is portrayed as being a Utopia where the Machines - Minds - have all but taken over the day to day running of the society, replete with limitless energy availability, hedonism, and the inhabitants can basically do just about whatever the heck they want.

The great thing about the Culture stories is that for some, that Utopia is a bit of a nightmare for them.

So much of human interaction is made difficult by our lack of understanding one another. I love these silly little fantasy worlds that we busy ourselves with, hell even television shows, because it gives people something else to share in common. You experienced the story, the music, the feel of the last episode of X, Y, Z, right? I was there, too, in a way. Let's share our thoughts.

Maybe if humans take it too far and forget to share, or neglect other things along the way, that the machine will stop.

I love these silly little fantasy worlds that we busy ourselves with, hell even television shows, because it gives people something else to share in common.

When all we did was find food, eat, sleep we all had everything in common.

The more things there are in the world, the fewer things we can have in common - Let's share our thoughts in more than a quick comment, or more than skim-reading a blog post? - "We don't have the time".

We may have a smaller proportion of things in common, but fewer, I'm not so sure about that. The richer the set of an individual's experience, the less he or she will have in common with other similarly rich individuals.

Truly a great book and happily it's available as an audiobook from LibraVox. There are three different readings, my favourite being this one. https://librivox.org/the-machine-stops-version-3-by-e-m-fors...

I read this in my college sci-fi lit class. It's still as amazing now, as it ever was. When WALL-E came out, I couldn't help but think that the screenwriters were heavily influenced by it.

I find it quite ironic that the 'machine' has failed dismally to reproduce this text correctly, by making the usual pigs ear of character encodings and rendering Ælfrid as �lfrid in my browser, the latter being corrupted beyond trivial machine recovery.

We (or at least speakers of languages that don't fit into ASCII) are doomed.

I love well written stuff. I wish we made more of this today.

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