Once again, I’ve come across a science fiction short story whose author managed, in a certain sense, to estimate the impact of technological development possibilities surprisingly well for his time. And even though the story celebrates its 110th anniversary since first publication this year, and its author couldn’t actually imagine digital computing technology at all, it sometimes tempts readers to compare it with the possibilities of today’s internet.
The short story The Machine Stops was written by E. M. Forster and it was first published in 1909. In Czech, it appeared as Stroj se zastaví translated by Jiří Janda only in 2011 as part of the Czech edition of the collection Síň slávy II B, which originally appeared in 1973 as The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.
I’ve always imagined the era when the author wrote the story as a time of rapid technoscientific progress and the resulting techno-optimism. Among other things, the telephone network was already gradually growing and improving (though still quite in its infancy), increasingly practical airships and heavier-than-air aircraft were attempting their first flights. And even though programmable computers didn’t exist yet, tabulators working with punched cards were already significantly facilitating mass data processing. On the other hand, in 1909 there was still no public radio broadcasting or civil aviation in operation. And the First World War, which would drive technological progress further but cool down optimism to the same degree, was still fewer than 5 years away.
Despite all this (or perhaps precisely because of it?), the story describes what appears to us as an insane dystopia, where people live more or less physically separated from one another and where all communication and most human needs are handled by machines.
I don’t want to spoil too much here or get bogged down in philosophical-sociological reflections on the story’s main message. Forster certainly didn’t aim to predict specific directions of technological progress. However, I would pause at several thoughts and ideas that caught my attention in the story.
For example, the description of air transport is quite bold even from today’s perspective, if we overlook the fact that airships are still used in the future :-) The author, at a time when aviation was taking its first steps, imagines a world where the system of civil international aviation has long achieved full automation and enormous transport capacity, but as a relic of the past, almost no one uses it anymore because people prefer virtual communication mediated by machines.
When you read the story from today’s perspective, you can’t help comparing it with today’s possibilities, for example in descriptions of video calls, “online” lectures, music playback, the number of acquaintances or “friends” given in thousands, or handling “unread messages”. However, it would be bold to claim that Forster predicts today’s internet. Rather, he tries to describe a world where, from his perspective, human dependence on machines is driven to absurd proportions, and to think through some possible consequences of all this.
The story also explores the complexity of the technology itself, which people no longer really understand without being willing to admit it. This leads the author to argue that human development is actually replaced by the development of the machine, which has taken power over humanity. However, Forster doesn’t write directly about artificial intelligence, and is more interested in the resulting human helplessness.
At certain moments, the story’s environment might in particular details remind one of the world from the movies THX 1138, Brazil, or The Matrix. But these are minor details or general ideas; don’t try to find a direct relationship between these movies and the story. On the other hand, this illustrates a certain timeless quality of the story. If someone replaced the specific technological concepts of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with what we have now, such a reworked version could still be published today.
References
Text of the story in English:
- The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster in epub format for download
- The Machine Stops on wikisource.org
For the Czech translation, one needs to reach for the book Síň slávy II B. But I can at least link to the article 100 let od Zastavení Stroje (100 Years Since The Machine Stopped), where you can find a short excerpt from the story’s text.