Welcome, My Son:
E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

2,165 words

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. The recreation and interpretation of history produces novels as varied and distant from one another in the time in which they are set as Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, Robert Graves’ Claudius novels, and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. But writers can also look into the future, predicting or merely entertaining, attempting to delineate what H. G. Wells called the shape of things to come. A great deal of this literary prognostication is to be found in the genre of science fiction.

I have mentioned this before, so I won’t crow about it again, but I was fortunate to see Isaac Asimov lecture on his only visit to Britain in 1974 when I was 13. I was even luckier to be pointed at by the great man during the post-lecture Q&A, and I asked whether the Professor thought it was the task of the science fiction writer to prepare us for the future. He did, he explained.

Some science fiction has proved predictive, but the scenarios tend to be simple ones. Jules Verne’s The First Men in the Moon, written in 1865 and thus towards the end of the American Civil War, was a foreshadowing of the Apollo 11 mission, but the idea of sending men to the Moon was, although fantastical, quite straightforward. Asimov himself, with his Three Laws of Robotics, seems to have provided the precursor to AI — as does Arthur C. Clarke in the short story “The Sentinel,” one of those on which Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey was based, with its famous but ultimately treacherous computer pilot HAL. But one minor book by a reasonably famous English novelist predicts the future not so much in the precise details, but in its overall tone, its master metaphor, and its description of an increasingly insular population reliant on technology: E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops.

Forster was an English writer I am not overly familiar with. I read his novel of the British Raj, A Passage to India, 40 years ago, as it was a standard text when I first studied Philosophy with Literature in the early 1980s, and I also remember enjoying Forster’s Italian romance, A Room with a View. But I have not read his four other major novels, although Maurice is famous in Britain for being a rare novel of the time which featured a homosexual as the main character, almost half a century before homosexuality was decriminalized.

The Machine Stops was written in 1909 — five years before what could be called the first mechanical war — and is perhaps too long to be described as a short story, while being too short to qualify as a novella. (Perhaps we need a new word for this halfway house, like the word “brunch,” which is neither breakfast nor lunch). Its subtitle is delightful: A Fantastic Story of Science Fiction. (Brief research doesn’t show that the generic term occurred much before Forster’s book.)

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

The two main — and more or less the only – characters are Vashti and Kuno, a mother and son. The population of Earth now all live in exactly the same way, inhabiting small, hexagonal, underground pods — Forster likens them to the cells in a beehive — in which everything is controlled by the central animating principle, known as the Machine. And that’s it — until, as the title might suggest, the Machine stops.

I am possibly a bit too attached to the idea of controlling metaphors in literary works, and this shows when it was that I went to university. In the early 1980s, when Critical Race Theory was still in its crib, its older brother was postmodernism, and its wiser cousin was post-structuralism. The latter has a bad reputation with those of us not on the psychotic Left because it is inextricably linked with postmodernism, but they are really very different schools of thought, and I still find that isolating master metaphors helps me to navigate a novel — and many other texts — in such a way as to reveal a coherent meaning. Fortunately, the master metaphor in The Machine Stops is contained in the title, and so is as difficult to miss as the same controlling tropes in Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.

The Machine is real; it exists in the material world. Towards the end, when malfunction threatens global disaster, it is said to be “dying in France.” But it is also metaphorical. The two characters — and by extension everyone else on the planet — are linked by a belief in the sanctity of mechanics. “You are beginning to worship the Machine,” says Kuno to his mother. Later, he gives his own reasons for a reluctance to risk his life by walking along a railway line:

It is not the proper thing, it is not mechanical, it is not decent to walk along a railway tunnel. I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible — doing what was not contemplated by the Machine.

Later, Kuno will talk about incorrect speech consisting of giving things “unmechanical names.” Thus, the Machine has two roles. Firstly, it is the supplier of all human needs, which do not now include going above ground unless absolutely necessary, personal contact, or physical strength (babies who show the first signs of potential physical prowess later in life “were destroyed”). Everything that a person living in a pod might need for comfortable survival is automatically supplied and regulated, and Vashti explains the change in the supply chain that came with the Machine via her own historical pursuits:

And of course she had studied the civilization that immediately preceded her own — the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the systems and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of bringing things to people.

This reversal of the consumer cycle here in the West started with florists and pizzas decades ago, but in an age of Amazon and Uber, even a small supermarket opposite me here in Central America has a motorcyclist who is constantly leaving with grocery deliveries (mostly for Americans, it must be said). Why visit the shop when the shop can visit you? Forster’s novel contains no consumer transactions in the way we might still understand them. There is no money and no direct commercial or personal contact. This is one of the reasons — and there are more — that the novel begins to feel eerily familiar.

In fact, people in the novel have almost no personal contact at all, and are “seized with the terrors of direct experience.” There is not even the attraction of travel, because the world has been reduced to one existential plane. “What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury?”

Forster predicts the Internet to a nicety. People communicate by a sort of global Zoom call, and work consists in lecturing and conversing rather than being physical. The Machine obviates the need for labor. The world has become ascetic and produces nothing but ideas:

I was surrounded by artificial light, artificial space, artificial peace, and my friends were calling to me through speaking-tubes to know whether I had come across any new ideas lately.

The production of ideas has replaced the current obsession with the body. Throughout the hive of cells, in each one “there sat a human being, eating, sleeping, or producing ideas.” But there is a sterility to Vashti’s thought, lecturer though she is (and concerning which her son reprimands her), and one line of hers shows a psychological subtext in the story. Vashti is reluctantly travelling to see her son Kuno, and can see mountains from the window of one of the airships that ferry the few passengers who still require travel. She is perturbed: “Cover the window please. These mountains give me no ideas.”

This is a proto-Orwellian strand in Forster’s novel which involves what might be called the curation of natural thought processes, something we now see hidden in plain sight. The Machine is based on something analogous to homeopathic “succession,” whereby a solution of water and some kind of vegetable or mineral preparation are shaken together violently before being distilled and the processed repeated dozens and even hundreds of times. By the end, there can be nothing left but water, but homeopaths talk about that water holding a “memory” of the original substance, and so being efficacious in treating this or that condition. (Please don’t think I am a fan of homeopathy, incidentally. I once went to the London Homeopathic Hospital and, despite their best attempts to convince me otherwise, I remain firmly tethered to reality. It’s a sham, in my opinion.)

But the example of homeopathy is irresistible when it comes to the Machine’s epistemological process by which thought is neutralized, just as Newspeak was designed by the Party to do in 1984:

Beware of first-hand ideas . . . [which] do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear . . . Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation.

This is the mechanics of ideology. You must disavow empiricism and trust the State to curate and prepare your experience of the world.

There is another curious feel to Forster’s novel I couldn’t place at first, until I realized that it felt Oriental. Vashti and her son Kuno have decidedly non-Occidental names, and the whole scenario is a digital noh play, renowned as they were for their simplicity and symbolism. Vashti, when talking of the aversion people have to going above ground, and considering the undesirability of doing so, even echoes the I Ching;

“No harm,” she replied, controlling herself. “But no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no advantage.”

This is the simple existential value system — and the exact language — of The Way of Tao.

The Internet and social media are also prefigured. Contact is made via a screen, and Vashti “knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.” A social credit system is in place, with homelessness being the dreaded penalty for dissent. Kuno fears homelessness for his outspokenness, but “could not tell you such a thing through the Machine,” hence the need for a personal meeting between mother and son. To continue the Pink Floyd quote at the start of this piece, and which itself prefigures our current machine-based surveillance state:

Where have you been?
It’s alright, we know where you’ve been.

Is our Machine stopping? Quite the reverse. I once spoke to an engineer who worked on diesel engines aboard canal boats. These are superb, low-revving engines that can be taken down to 60 revs a minute and still drive a 15-ton boat via a foot-wide propellor. He told me about so-called “galloping” engines. He had seen one and had seen engineers run away from them. These are engines that rev up uncontrollably and can’t be stopped. Once an engine built to rev low gets too fast, bits start to fly off it, hence engineers fleeing the scene. That’s where I think we are.

If you enjoy science fiction and don’t know The Machine Fails, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It cost me 82p — just over a dollar — on Kindle. For me, it was something of a godsend. I am writing a longer project, part of which involves the philosophical and political division between the mechanical master-metaphor and the organic — or “the lathe and the fern,” as I think of it. The Machine Fails fell into my lap. It was like going into a thrift store or charity shop and trying on a suit and finding it fits like bespoke tailoring.

Curiously, Forster’s reputation is as a writer whose center of gravity is the English class system, and is reinforced by what I have read. There is no class system in The Machine Fails, however; there is just system. And systems cannot be relied on simply because they are systemic. This is the technological fallacy. AI, in my opinion, is this year’s GameBoy, and the hysterics whipped up by the likes of Elon Musk — who I have praised, but who should know better — are just that: media clickbait drummed up by the type of people who think we are living in the matrix or a simulation. These tend to be adult males who still read comic books and graphic novels. But if our current civilization is commanded not by a machine but by the machine as its master metaphor, then we must heed the warning of one of Forster’s characters:

The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal.

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