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

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

Kuno wants to rediscover what really matters. His conclusions, like Forster's own, are not explicitly religious. He determines that "man is the measure"--not machine but also not God. But his understanding of man clearly includes nature, history, mystery--the big questions that we may get I too busy in front of our personal computers to ask.

(1) Frederic Crews (1962), Barbara Rosecrance (1982), the 1985 Twentieth Century Literature special issue on Forster, and the collections of essays edited by Herz and Martin (1982, one sentence excepted) and Alan Wilde (1985, one phrase excepted), e.g., offer no discussion of the story. Critics making brief and critical mention of it include Oliver, Wilde, Kelvin, Macauley, and Martin; Thomson's treatment is lengthier but also critical. Other somewhat lengthier treatments include Stone and Colmer; recent discussions focusing more on narrative technique include Lesser, Herz, and Widdicombe. Those citing the work as prophetic include Warner, Shusterman, Brander, Martin, Cavaliero, Gillie, and Lesser. Critics discussing it within the context of science fiction or dystopian fiction include Hillegas, Wolfe, Warrick, Dunn and Erlich, Lewis, Elkins, Beauchamp, and Pierce. Given what we have now seen of computerization, contemporary critics are far less likely to find Forster's central image "a problem ... too dominant ... too vast and inescapable" (Thomson 63), but still in 1987 Lesser comments that "part of the reason we cannot sympathize much with Forster's characters is that they inhabit a world which is defined as strictly other than ours" (179). Is it?

(2) Asimov frequently comments about the "Frankenstein complex" in science fiction (e.g., 5-6).

(3) Cf. Neil Postman's discussion of "technopoly," "the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology" (70). The "Technopoly story is without a moral center ... [It says] there is indeed a common culture whose name is Technopoly and whose key symbol is now the computer, toward which there must be neither irreverence nor blasphemy" (179). Also cf. Roszak's comments about the "Information Age, which makes every computer around us what the relics of the True Cross were in the Age of Faith"; a "cultlike mystique ... has come to surround the computer"; there is "the real danger that we fall prey to a technological idolatry, allowing an invention of our own hands to become the image that dominates our understanding of ourselves and all nature around us" (x, xi, 40).

(4) "`The Machine,' they exclaimed, `feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being"' (29): this passage echoes Acts of the Apostles 17: 28: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being" (King James Version).

(5) Cf. Roszak: futurologists have promised that "nobody need ever leave the house, which will become school and workplace by virtue of the earth-girdling information networks that serve it"; meanwhile today's university spends "millions to spare its students the exercise of leaving their dorms" (33, 61). It is indeed tempting to indulge in detailed comparisons between Forster's story and aspects of today's computerized lifestyle--especially the Internet, video games (our children in front of a machine learning their "stops and buttons" ["Machine" 21]), a paperless environment to replace the "ages of litter" (7), distance learning, virtual reality, and so on--illustrated by an aerial photo of people at computer work stations. But most of that will be left to the reader's imagination. (By the way, I use as much of the above technology myself as I or my university's budget can afford.)