# What did E. M. Forster imagine in 'The Machine Stops'?

Date: 2019-08-24 · Author: Robert Scales · https://guidetoartificialintelligence.com/en/learn/what-happens-in-the-machine-stops/

**Answer:** "The Machine Stops" is a short story by E. M. Forster, first published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909. It imagines people living alone in underground rooms where a vast global Machine supplies food, music, conversation and even religion, until the Machine slowly breaks down and the civilization that depends on it collapses.

In November 1909 the novelist E. M. Forster published a long short story, about 12,000 words, in a magazine called *The Oxford and Cambridge Review*. It describes a future in which almost nobody leaves their room. A single worldwide system, simply called the Machine, feeds people, clothes them, carries their voices and faces to each other, and plays them music on demand. People talk constantly, travel rarely and touch almost never.

The story is called "The Machine Stops," and the title gives away the ending. What makes it worth reading is how carefully Forster imagines the everyday life of a society that depends entirely on a system no one understands any more.

## When and why it was written

The story first appeared in the November 1909 issue of the *Review*. In 1928 Forster reprinted it in a collection of his stories, *The Eternal Moment*. Introducing his *Collected Short Stories* in 1947, he explained that he had written it as a reaction to one of the "earlier heavens" of H. G. Wells. Wells had written hopeful books about scientifically planned futures, including *A Modern Utopia* in 1905. Forster's story imagines the same kind of technical progress and asks what it might do to people.

## What happens in the story

The story has three parts: "The Air-Ship," "The Mending Apparatus" and "The Homeless."

It opens in a small six-sided room, which Forster compares to a cell in a beehive. There are no windows and no lamps, yet the room glows softly and the air is fresh. A woman named Vashti sits in a moving armchair, the only furniture besides a reading desk. Buttons bring her food, a bath, a bed or music. She knows several thousand people and spends her time exchanging "ideas" with them and giving lectures to listeners who stay in their own rooms. A blue plate shows her the face of whoever she is talking to.

Her son, Kuno, lives on the other side of the world. He calls and asks her to visit in person, because he does not want to talk "through the Machine." Vashti dreads the journey by airship, which means seeing the sky, the sea and other people directly, but she goes. Kuno tells her that he has climbed up an old ventilation shaft and reached the surface of the earth without permission. Up there, in the hills of what was once Wessex, he found fresh air, and he suspects that some people still live outside the Machine. For this he has been threatened with "Homelessness," expulsion to the surface, which everyone believes means death.

Vashti is horrified and returns home. Over the following years two changes take hold. The respirators that allow people to visit the surface are abolished, because going outside is seen as pointless and vulgar. And a religion grows up around the Machine: in theory it is still a human creation, but in practice nearly everyone worships it and praises it as all-powerful and eternal.

Then small faults begin. The music develops strange sighing noises. Complaints go to the Committee of the Mending Apparatus, the part of the system meant to repair everything else, which promises fixes that never come. People get used to the defects. Then beds fail to appear, the light dims and the air turns foul. The Mending Apparatus itself, it turns out, needs mending, and no one alive knows how to repair it. Finally the steady hum that everyone has heard since birth stops, and the silence alone kills thousands. In the ruins, Vashti and Kuno find each other and hold each other, something they have not done since he was a small boy. Before they die, Kuno tells her that people still live on the surface and will carry on.

## The Machine, piece by piece

Forster never explains the Machine's engineering, but he describes what it does. Here is how its main services line up with technology people know in 2019.

| In the story | What it does | Familiar in 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| The blue plate | Shows a person's face during a call | Video calls on phones and laptops |
| Lectures from armchairs | Talks given to audiences who never meet | Webinars and online courses |
| Buttons for food, music, a bath | Everything delivered on request | Streaming music and delivery apps |
| The Book of the Machine | Instructions for every possible situation | Searching the web for every question |
| The Mending Apparatus | The system that repairs the system | Automated monitoring of large computer networks |

> **Try it:** Keep a note for one day of every time a machine decides something for you: a route, a song, a news story, a reply suggestion. At the end of the day, mark the ones you would not know how to do without it.

## Why it matters

"The Machine Stops" has become a classic of science fiction. It was voted one of the best novellas published up to 1965, and in 1973 it was chosen for the second volume of the anthology *The Science Fiction Hall of Fame*. As early as 1976, a British Open University course on telecommunications used its first chapter to discuss how communication networks change society.

The story's main warning is about dependence: people who rely so completely on a system that they lose the ability to live, or even think, without it. Forster adds a second theme that he called "the sin against the body," the idea that a life spent entirely in words and ideas can cut people off from their own physical existence and from the natural world.

## Why do people still read 'The Machine Stops' in the age of AI?

Partly because so much of its world looks familiar. In 2019 many people do much of their talking through screens, receive music and films on request, and ask a voice assistant for the weather, a recipe or a fact. Recommendation systems, which are a form of AI, quietly choose much of what they read and watch. None of that makes the story a prediction come true, but it makes Vashti's room easier to picture than it was in 1909.

The deeper reason is the Mending Apparatus. Forster's Machine does not turn evil or rebel. It simply grows so large and complicated that the people inside it stop understanding how it works, and then forget that anyone ever built it. That concern is a live one in 2019, when complex AI systems can be hard even for their designers to explain. The story suggests a modest habit worth keeping: know which systems you depend on, and keep some skills that work when they stop.

## Sources

- The Machine Stops: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
- The Machine Stops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops