Forster, E. M.

(1879–1970)

English author known chiefly for Passage to India and four or five other distinguished novels. The Machine Stops (1909) is a long short story. Its setting is in the future, but it does not pretend to be seriously predictive. Forster described it as “a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells.” At the beginning and the end, he calls it a “meditation.”
The story begins with a middle-aged woman living in a windowless hexagonal
room. Her name is Vashti. The room is artificially lit, and although there is no ventilation, the air is fresh. Sounds, musical and otherwise, are piped into it. Vashti sits in an armchair with a reading desk, the room’s only furniture. The chair has a motor and moves her about the room at will. Every need is met by pressing a button in a formidable array. There are buttons for food, clothing, hot and cold baths, the bed. There are buttons for telephone conversations with other individuals. Vashti not only lives in the hexagonal room, she hardly ever leaves it because there is nothing to leave it for.
It transpires that the room is underground and everybody else lives in similar rooms, likewise underground. Earth’s surface is uninhabited, or assumed to be so, and has largely reverted to wilderness. The global complex of cell dwellings is organized and governed by the Machine. The geniuses who invented and built the Machine are long since dead, but it goes on functioning, and the society that it sustains is regarded by Vashti and almost everyone else as eternally stable, problem-free, and never to be questioned.
Forster, of course, is writing before the advent of computers and speculations about their dominating humanity. His Machine dominates but more subtly. It simply provides and regulates. But it provides and regulates everything and has been doing it for centuries. There is a human Committee of the Machine, but no one controls it in any fundamental way, and it is doubtful whether anyone wants to or even knows how. It is axiomatically perfect. What it delivers is, in fact, second-rate at best—artificial fruit, for instance, is not as good as the real thing—but “good enough” has long since been accepted as a guiding principle.
One result of total dependence and acquiescence in mediocrity has been deterioration. Vashti in her mechanized chair is “a swaddled lump of flesh,” small, pallid, without hair, and without energy. For her and for most human beings, the subterranean cellular world is reality and the world outside is not, or is real only in a very subordinate sense. She talks with her son Kuno, who lives thousands of miles away, through a sort of anticipatory television. During one of their conversations, which are rare and brief, he says he would like her to come and see him. She says, “But I can see you! What more do you want?” It is hard for her to handle the notion of meeting physically, not through the medium of the Machine.
She is in contact with thousands of other cells, constituting, in effect, an Internet—another of Forster’s casual anticipations. They listen to recorded music, they converse with each other, they give short lectures. Their chief mental concern is with “ideas.” These are seldom derived from experience or direct observation. In fact, they may quite well be derived from other ideas with a pedigree running back through a

series of authors who had similar ones. Vashti does not go even as far as that. Her only book is the Machine manual telling which buttons to press in every conceivable contingency. She spins ideas out of her own head and gives lectures.
Not wanting to accept her son’s invitation to visit him, she excuses herself, saying she is not well. Kuno takes her at her word and notifies her doctor, with the result that a huge medical apparatus drops from the ceiling and subjects her to tests and treatment. Deciding to go after all, she takes an elevator to the surface and boards an airship. Flight still happens, though on a small scale. Since every place is like every other place, there is seldom any motive for travel. Vashti’s home is in Sumatra. At night, her flight attendant shuts out the stars with metal blinds. In daylight, the airship passes over the Himalayas, and she asks the attendant what the white stuff is in the cracks of the mountains. The attendant doesn’t recognize snow, and as the range suggests no ideas, Vashti asks for it to be shut out. Later, flying over the Caucasus, she takes a brief look, gets no ideas from those mountains either, and shuts them out also. She does the same with Greece. Her metal blind is closed for most of the flight.
When she meets Kuno in England, he shocks her by confessing to a serious interest in the outer world. People do occasionally go up from below but only to look, not to do anything or stay for long. Kuno’s interest is different. It is intense and rebellious; he is in revolt against the Machine. He has flown as his mother has, but unlike her, he looked at the stars and picked out Orion. His longing to know more of the surface has led him to an unauthorized excursion and near-destruction by the Machine. He is threatened with the ultimate punishment of homelessness—expulsion from the cellular hive and permanent exile to the outer air, which, supposedly, cannot sustain Machine-conditioned life for long. Vashti thinks him mad, and they never meet again.
Years pass. The Machine’s dominance increases, and it is virtually deified, even worshiped. Admittedly, it is not infallible: it can go wrong in minor ways. When that happens, however, it puts things right itself by means of a Mending Apparatus. Since the Mending Apparatus is a built-in part of it, the small disruptions do not detract from its overall flawlessness. While there is a Committee of the Mending Apparatus, this human element is strictly subsidiary.
But something goes wrong that the Mending Apparatus fails to correct. A recorded symphony that is often played by the cell dwellers is interrupted by “gasping sighs.” Complaints to the committee have no effect. Perhaps the members have no idea what to do; perhaps the workings of the Machine are beyond them. It slowly becomes apparent that the Mending Apparatus has defects of its own, but since the Machine is perfect and cannot be interfered with, the Apparatus must be allowed to mend itself. With the musical difficulty, the only nonblasphemous response is to incorporate the gasping sighs and recognize them as part of the symphony. The same happens with other, more drastic developments. Synthetic fruit goes moldy, bath water stinks, and beds fail to emerge when the cell dwellers want to sleep. In each crisis, the Mending Apparatus remains ineffective.
To Vashti, via the communicating system, Kuno makes a last enigmatic remark: “The Machine is stopping.” She refuses to listen, and he says no more. But things are plainly getting worse. Exhortations to trust the Machine are carrying less and less conviction. Rumors of sabotage are spreading, but no saboteurs are found. At last, suddenly, the communication system collapses. When Vashti gives one of her lectures, she hears no applause at the end, and her attempts to contact listeners individually are unsuccessful. The light is growing dim, and opening the door on to the passage outside her cell, she finds a panic-stricken crowd milling about

and fighting. She shuts herself in again and presses every button, and none work. The people in the passage cease to struggle and die feebly in the dark, incapable of any action. The Machine is stopping.
Here, Forster’s “meditation” ends. His interpretation of his imagined world is that humanity’s denial of its own full nature, its rejection of the life of the body and senses in unison with the soul, has ended in retribution. Because of the Machine, the neglected body has been reduced to “white pap,” the mind itself is empty, the spirit that once reached heavenward has expired, and when the Machine stops, its dependants have no resources of their own. Kuno, as a last disembodied voice, reveals that he has found human beings alive on the surface—banished homeless who have survived. With the Machine eliminated at last, they may be able to make a fresh start.