Images of a networked society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Marcia Bundy Seabury

Increasingly shut off visually from a world they did not make, Forster's citizens focus their attention on what their own hands have wrought, and look less and less toward an ultimate maker. The mother in the story, Vashti, expresses in a sentence the belief haunting the nineteenth century under the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the ongoing discoveries in the sciences: "I worship nothing. I'm most advanced." As the narrator puts it, ironically, no longer were men "compacted by thinking of a power outside the world" (13). A city underground, then, suggests the danger that modern, man become literally and figuratively contained, physically and also spiritually.

A second key image is of course the machine itself. Writing long before the giant ENIAC of 1946, Forster describes a machine that electronically controls the various aspects of daily life in the underground city--dare we call it a computer? One of its aspects is simple mechanization: pushing a button produces results. The machine is also explicitly described as a communications system--a reaction to the then-new possibility of telephones (with a prediction of the videophones most of us still do not have), plus a prevision of "a sort of television," as Furbank describes it (262; cf. Shusterman 52)? But the machine is more. Nominally a Central Committee and a Committee of the Mending Apparatus are in charge, but the narrator and the characters consistently use verbs of agency for the machine. It seems to store and process information and operate automatically, two features distinguishing a computer; it seems to make decisions and evolve on its own.

Such a giant machine has become common fare in science fiction stories and novels of the post-ENIAC decades. Forster prefigures those often nightmarish stories in showing the varied dangers, both physical and spiritual, arising from its creation. The well-known archetype underlying his portrayal is the Frankenstein myth, man arrogating to himself the powers of the creator and ultimately being destroyed by his own creation. As with Frankenstein, the creators of Forster's society intend not evil but good, the betterment of human life. But the finite creator does not fully understand what he has created; the created takes on a life of its own; monster becomes master.

Many have followed Forster in considering this theme. In Karel Capek's play R. U. R. (1923), containing the first use of the term robot, the robots takeover from their arrogant, would-be-God creators. Aldous Huxley writes explicitly that "we do have to start thinking how we can get control again of our inventions. This is a kind of Frankenstein monster problem" (qtd. in Bedford 674-75).(2) But Forster's work has the additional dimension that not just particular created beings or inventions but the very environment itself is seen as the monster. He writes* that as time passes, "there was not one who understood the monster as a whole." Lest we miss the Frankenstein parallel, in the same paragraph he refers to the Romantic concept of the overreacher that Mary Shelley explored: "Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself" (29).