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

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

* Bees seem continually busy, as our laudatory cliche emphasizes. Forster's individuals bustle self-importantly about their activities. Vashti is far from idle: she has people to get back to on her network, lectures to listen to, a lecture to write, always something to do. She keeps telling Kuno to "be quick." Forster, like Huxley later, in Brave New World, shows people becoming consumed by their busy daily round of activities and thus shielded from thought and question about their fives, their values.

* The individual bee seems subsumed by the group. The individual is not only small but essentially helpless, dwarfed by the system, serving it. Vashti, like almost all other members of her society, lacks the power to think or act as an individual. She talks about the growth of her soul, but all we see her doing is keeping the electronic circuits active while her soul atrophies.

Subsequent twentieth-century dystopias, such as Huxley's Brave New World and Zamyatin's We, also use the hive metaphor. Forster goes further by providing a striking visual image of a hive, but these other worlds are more hive-like insofar as the bees come and go from their hive (a feature of hives Dunn and Erlich point out in discussion of We [49]). In fact, Forster emphasizes the cell as much as the hive itself, which further defines his work. Focusing on the cell helps us to see that the differences between a beehive and a computerized, networked society matter as much as the similarities:

* While we think of bees in a teeming mass, the modern human hive, as discussed above, is increasingly decentralized. Since the interaction is electronic, individuals are increasingly alone in their cells rather than brought together.

* The bee is physically busy; we in our networked cells are mentally busy while our bodies are passive. Our "buzz" is electronic.

* Beehives are stratified. People in individual cells with their machines have become homogeneous. The queen bee in such a world is the machine itself

* A beehive is an organic structure, with bees following natural instincts and thus fulfilling their nature. When people live in cells that totally exclude the natural world, and suppress many of their natural instincts, the result is not honey, or "sweetness and light." Living the lifestyle they think they love, Vashti and her fellows reap a recurring but unacknowledged irritability.

* An organic hive endures, subject to the intervention of outside forces; its modern human counterpart can collapse from internal causes. In contrast to a story like Asimov's "The Evitable Conflict," in which a computer keeps the whole world's systems running smoothly, even allowing for human perversity in its calculations, Forster offers a vision that rings true to our daily experience: a computer can break down.

Forster's world of hive/cell, then, can best be described in a series of paradoxes: many people yet isolation; centralized authority, control, power, yet a decentralized lifestyle; busyness yet physical and spiritual stasis; stability yet fragility. However, Forster does not leave us with only a dark vision of a future world; like his more famous dystopian successors, he includes a rebel. Elkins comments that "we are not certain why he [Kuno] is different" (58). That very lack of explanation about Kuno may express Forster's belief in the human spirit: despite conditioning, despite counter pressures, something in the best of us will remain unsatisfied and searching amidst life in an environment created by man, sustained by machine, and lived as part of an electronic network. In this sense Forster's story is more optimistic than Brave New World, in which both Bernard and Helmholtz Watson have inborn reasons for thinking differently from others in their society.