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The Machine Stops

#1
Yazata Online
I just discovered this today. It's a science fiction short story of an extraordinarly distopian sort, written in 1909 by E.M. Forster.

It takes place in an imagined future when everyone's needs are taken care of by a giant world-wide machine. While great airships still exist, travel is increasingly rare. Since everywhere on Earth is exactly like every other place, why go anywhere? Everyone lives alone in their own personal cell-like room underground where the machine supplies them with everything they want. (And what people are capable of wanting is increasingly limited to what the machine provides.) They rarely if ever feel any desire to leave their rooms. (The idea of doing so scares them.) But they feel that they are always in touch with everything important because they have their... screens! Screens that give them access to all the information they desire (less and less) and permitting them to communicate instantly with anyone on Earth. (Forster's 1909 vision of cell-phone zombies, social media and the Internet!) There's really just one book that's vital in their world, the Book of the Machine, that explains how to work the keyboard in every cell to get whatever they want. Some of them have begun praying to the Book of the Machine in moments of need, bowing before it and consider it a holy text. (The Machine provides all, right?) Communication is dying just as travel did, since what's the point of talking to strangers if one has nothing to say? People spend their time staring at the walls of their cells, but feel disturbed and bothered when others call on their screens. While everyone is constantly in touch, nobody physically touches any longer, doing so is considered horribly gross. While the airships still have windows from the time when people still gazed out, the windows are always shuttered now because nobody is interested any longer. There's a scene where the shutter moves a crack exposing one of the story's two protagonists with her pasty white death-like skin to an incredibly bright ray of light... a ray of sunlight. She recoils and touches a stranger whose reaction is: "How dare you??"

One of the most famous passages in the story, featuring what pass as intellectuals in that age, reminded me of MR in the lion's den (... that other place). [Highlighting by me]:

Beware of first-hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element --- direct observation... But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another... You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time" --- his voice rose --- "there will come a generation that has got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from the taint of personality!"

Here's the story:

https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/O...-Stops.pdf

It really looks like an inspiration for Aldus Huxley's Brave New World. And more directly George Lucas' TXH 1138. There's also a certain hint of French poststructuralism to it, with reality dismissed in favor of texts. interpreted by other texts, interpreted by... in an infinite regress of Derridian 'differance'.

Here's a little essay about it.

http://henryoarnold.com/beware-of-first-hand-ideas/


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#2
Syne Offline
Sounds similar to Solaria in Asimov's The Naked Sun.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
Read through, one time mind you, The Machine Stops. At first it reminded me of Tanner's  Tumithak of the Corridors, a short story I loved as a young guy. No leg humping worms on the surface, just a bunch of Earth conquering spider like critters called Shelks. In the end I think it was purely science.

As I read on I thought, as I am inclined to do often, of evolution. To be honest I thought of the loss of the sense of touch in a species that didn't really require it much anymore, even when it came to propagation as the story seemed to indicate. Is it natural for evolution to slowly do away with touch or at least diminish its importance for underground dwellers seeking/preferring isolation? Also the evolutionary changes that might occur when a species moves below the surface to survive appeared to be evident here. Smell seemed to be a sense that was heightened in the story, why I don't know but in a world that relies less on touch and to some degree without light, smell and maybe taste would come to the forefront. Sound generated by the machine also affected the hearing of the inhabitants, creating changes they never realized until it stopped.  In fact there appeared to have been enough changes to human physiology (sense organs/breathing) that humans could no longer survive on the surface. To me the psychological affects aspect doesn't really matter when the apocalyptic event (machine broken) occurs because there's a good chance no one is left standing and even if there is, they will need to adapt. 

I think that Forster may have wanted us to focus on the affects the psychological damage caused by isolation but I think it's more of the affect a dependence on one thing has on the human species (or any species). He may have inadvertently showed us why species die off and it's all about adapt or die. Or maybe that's what he was trying to do and if so i think it pure genius. Not sure how society viewed Darwin a century ago but I'm thinking there was still a good groundswell of opinion against it.
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#4
C C Offline
(Nov 18, 2019 05:05 AM)Yazata Wrote: I just discovered this today. It's a science fiction short story of an extraordinarly distopian sort, written in 1909 by E.M. Forster.


Wasn't one of my brother's strewn-around paperbacks, but I do recall seeing the title somewhere/somehow during childhood. Never bobbed around enough in awareness and memory to compel curiosity about it later.

Quote:... Everyone lives alone in their own personal cell-like room underground where the machine supplies them with everything they want. ... They rarely if ever feel any desire to leave their rooms. (The idea of doing so scares them.) But they feel that they are always in touch with everything important because they have their... screens! Screens that give them access to all the information they desire (less and less) and permitting them to communicate instantly with anyone on Earth. (Forster's 1909 vision of cell-phone zombies, social media and the Internet!)


I don't know how Arthur C. Clarke got attributed to being the one who predicted the internet, what with this predating his forecasts by decades.

Quote:... People spend their time staring at the walls of their cells, but feel disturbed and bothered when others call on their screens. While everyone is constantly in touch, nobody physically touches any longer, doing so is considered horribly gross....


Sheltered conditions which would also diminish a population's contact with the physically abrasive properties and cruelties of life. No sticks and stones anymore as a contrast, so words really should hurt and traumatize them since they've never encountered and adapted to anything more harsh in magnitude.

Quote:[...] Beware of first-hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element --- direct observation...

Sounds almost like a combo of Machian metaphysical skepticism or agnosticism about anything non-phenomenal that was popular at the time, combined with influence from Plato's Republic, where the latter delves into repeated levels of copied ideas straying farther from the original. But here the latter is spurned rather than desired.
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