The Machine Stops
Based on Wikipedia: The Machine Stops
In 1909, a novelist who had never owned a telephone wrote a story that predicted Zoom calls, the internet, and our pandemic-era isolation with such eerie precision that a BBC critic called it "a jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breathtakingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020."
The novelist was E. M. Forster, better known for refined Edwardian dramas like A Room with a View and Howards End. The story was "The Machine Stops."
A World Underground
Imagine humanity driven beneath the Earth's surface by climate catastrophe. The air above has turned toxic. Sunlight is a memory. But this isn't a tale of hardship—quite the opposite. Every human being lives in perfect comfort in an identical hexagonal cell, their every need attended to by an omnipotent global Machine.
Food arrives at the touch of a button. Entertainment streams endlessly. Communication happens instantly through video screens connecting you to anyone on the planet. Sound familiar?
The people in Forster's vision don't work in any physical sense. They produce "ideas"—though these ideas are really just commentary on other people's commentary, an infinite regress of abstraction. They attend virtual lectures. They share opinions through instant messaging. They have thousands of "friends" whom they've never touched.
And they never, ever leave their rooms.
Mother and Son
The story centers on Vashti, a perfectly adapted citizen of this underground world, and her son Kuno, who is decidedly not. They live on opposite sides of the planet—Vashti somewhere beneath what was once Australia, Kuno beneath what was once Europe. They haven't seen each other in person for years.
Vashti is content. She spends her days giving lectures on "Music During the Australian Period" (themselves summaries of other people's summaries), and she's irritated when friends invite her to be more social. Why would she want that? Everything she needs is right here in her room. The Machine provides.
Kuno is different. He's restless. He's been exercising his body—a deeply suspicious activity in a world where muscles have atrophied over generations. And he has a secret: he's found a way to reach the surface.
The Journey No One Wants to Take
When Kuno asks his mother to visit him in person, Vashti recoils. The journey would mean hours in an airship, surrounded by strangers, with nothing to do but look out windows at the barren Earth below. The very thought makes her anxious.
But she goes. And when she arrives, Kuno tells her what he's discovered.
He had obtained a respirator—the breathing apparatus needed to survive on the toxic surface—and climbed upward through forgotten maintenance shafts. What he found at the top changed everything: grass pushing through dead soil. Stars visible in the night sky. And most astonishing of all, other humans. People living outside the Machine entirely.
"I had seen humanity," Kuno tells his mother. "I had seen the hills and the sky."
But the Machine's mechanical servants found him. Dragged him back underground. Now he faces "Homelessness"—expulsion to the surface without protection, which everyone assumes means death.
Vashti listens to her son's story with growing horror. Not horror at what the Machine did to him, but horror at his rebellion. To question the Machine is unthinkable. It borders on insanity. She returns home and tries to forget their conversation.
When the Machine Becomes God
This is where Forster's satire cuts deepest. In the years that follow Kuno's attempted escape, two things happen that accelerate humanity's descent.
First, the authorities ban respirators entirely. No one may visit the surface anymore. Most people welcome this. They're afraid of "direct experience"—of seeing things for themselves rather than through the Machine's mediation. First-hand knowledge has become suspect. Only information processed and packaged by the Machine feels trustworthy.
Second, a new religion emerges: the worship of the Machine itself.
People begin to pray to it. They develop rituals around its buttons and switches. They speak of it with reverence, as though it were divine rather than mechanical. They forget that their ancestors built it. They forget that it could break.
Forster, writing in 1909, was watching the early stages of what we now call technological religion—the faith that our tools will solve all problems, that progress is inevitable, that the systems we've created are beyond our understanding and therefore beyond our control.
The Mending Apparatus
Here's the detail that makes the story's ending feel inevitable rather than arbitrary: the Mending Apparatus has stopped working.
The Mending Apparatus is the part of the Machine responsible for repairing all other parts. It's the maintenance system, the self-correction mechanism. And it's broken. But no one knows how to fix it—that knowledge has been lost. People dismissed early concerns because, well, the Machine is omnipotent. It will heal itself. It always has.
This is the trap of complex systems. Each generation inherits technology created by the previous one, uses it, depends on it, but understands it a little less. Eventually, you have a civilization running on infrastructure no living person knows how to repair.
Small Malfunctions
The decay begins slowly. The music that plays through the walls becomes slightly off-key. The artificial fruit tastes a bit wrong. The lighting flickers. The beds are less comfortable than they used to be.
Everyone notices. No one panics.
They've been trained to accept whatever the Machine provides as correct by definition. If the music sounds different, perhaps the Machine has improved it. If the food tastes strange, perhaps their own senses are failing. The idea that the Machine itself could be deteriorating is literally unthinkable—it contradicts their entire worldview.
Forster captures something profound here about how societies adjust to decline. Each small failure becomes the new normal. Each complaint gets rationalized away. The accumulation of minor problems doesn't trigger alarm; it just recalibrates expectations downward.
The Machine Stops
Kuno, now living in a cell near his mother's, has been watching the signs. He understands what's happening even if no one else will admit it.
"The Machine stops," he tells Vashti cryptically.
She doesn't want to hear it. She goes back to her lectures, her ideas, her comfortable routines. But the malfunctions multiply. The air grows stale. The communication screens glitch and die. The lights begin to fail.
And then, all at once, it's over.
The Machine collapses. Not in a spectacular explosion, but in a grinding, wheezing failure of every system simultaneously. The artificial air stops flowing. The food stops arriving. The walls begin to crack. Across the entire planet, in millions of identical hexagonal cells, humanity begins to suffocate.
The Embrace
In her final moments, Vashti receives a visitor. Kuno has crawled through the dying tunnels to reach her. They hold each other—the first physical contact between them since he was a small child.
"I am dying," Vashti says. "But we touch, we talk, not through the Machine."
In their last breaths, they glimpse the truth they'd been avoiding all along. The surface-dwellers Kuno saw—the ones who escaped the Machine, who live in the open air, who know what grass feels like—they will survive. They will rebuild. And perhaps, Kuno hopes, they will remember this catastrophe well enough not to repeat it.
"Humanity has learnt its lesson," he says. Though Forster's tone suggests he wasn't entirely convinced.
The Sin Against the Body
In his preface to the story, Forster identified what he considered its central theme: "the sin against the body."
This is worth unpacking. Forster wasn't a religious writer, so "sin" here is metaphorical. What he meant was the tendency of civilization to treat the physical body as an inconvenience—something to be transcended, optimized away, made irrelevant by technology.
The citizens in "The Machine Stops" have become, essentially, brains in comfortable boxes. They've lost the ability to breathe unfiltered air, to walk long distances, to tolerate temperature variations. Their muscles have withered. Their skin can't handle sunlight. They've evolved—or devolved—into creatures perfectly adapted to their artificial environment and utterly helpless outside it.
This physical helplessness mirrors their intellectual helplessness. They can no longer think original thoughts, only recombine existing ideas. They can no longer experience reality directly, only consume mediated versions of it. The Machine hasn't just weakened their bodies; it's weakened their capacity for genuine understanding.
A Rebuttal to Utopia
Forster wrote "The Machine Stops" as a deliberate response to H. G. Wells, particularly Wells's 1905 book A Modern Utopia. Wells was technology's great cheerleader, constantly imagining futures where rational planning and advanced machinery would solve humanity's problems. His utopias were managed by benevolent experts using the best available science.
Forster found this vision terrifying.
Where Wells saw liberation through technology, Forster saw a new form of imprisonment. Where Wells imagined wise administrators, Forster saw the elimination of individual judgment. Where Wells celebrated efficiency, Forster mourned the loss of spontaneity, embodiment, and genuine human connection.
The argument between them echoes through the twentieth century and into our own time. It's the argument between those who see technology as essentially neutral (a tool to be used well or badly) and those who suspect that certain technologies reshape us in ways we don't fully control.
Predictions and Parallels
The story's technological predictions are remarkable for their specificity. Forster imagined:
- Instant global communication through video screens
- A network connecting everyone to everyone else
- Virtual lectures attended by thousands simultaneously
- The replacement of physical travel with remote presence
- An economy based on producing and sharing "ideas" rather than physical goods
- The atrophying of in-person social skills
- Anxiety about unmediated, direct experience
He wrote this when the telephone was still a novelty and radio broadcasting hadn't been invented yet.
But the deeper parallels aren't technological—they're psychological. Forster understood that convenience is a trap. Each labor-saving device makes the next one more necessary. Each step away from direct experience makes directness feel more threatening. The process is gradual enough that no single generation notices how far things have drifted.
The Lockdown Connection
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced much of humanity to live Vashti's life—communicating only through screens, receiving deliveries rather than venturing outside, losing the habit of physical presence—readers rediscovered "The Machine Stops" with a shock of recognition.
Will Gompertz's BBC article in May 2020 went viral. Suddenly, a 111-year-old story by an Edwardian novelist was trending on social media. People who'd never heard of E. M. Forster were reading his vision of isolated, screen-dependent humanity and finding it uncomfortably familiar.
The parallel wasn't perfect, of course. We still have windows. Our air hasn't turned toxic (not completely, anyway). We can still leave our homes when we choose to. But the ease with which many adapted to screen-mediated existence—the way some even preferred it—suggested that Forster had identified something true about human psychology.
We are more willing to retreat from physical reality than we might like to admit.
The Legacy
"The Machine Stops" has influenced science fiction for over a century. Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun (1957) depicts a planet where humans live in isolation, interacting only through holographic projections—essentially Forster's vision transplanted to outer space. George Lucas's THX 1138 (1971) imagines a similar underground dystopia of drugged compliance and technological control.
The space rock band Hawkwind released a concept album based on the story in 2016. Graphic novel adaptations have appeared. Stage productions continue to be mounted. The story refuses to become dated.
Perhaps this persistence reflects the story's core insight: that the dangers Forster identified aren't specific to any particular technology. They're about the relationship between humans and the tools we create. Whether the machine in question is a global artificial intelligence or a smartphone, the questions remain the same.
How much convenience is too much? At what point does a helpful tool become an inescapable dependency? When does optimization become atrophy?
The Machine Runs
Reading "The Machine Stops" in 2025, you might expect to feel relief. After all, we're not underground. We haven't forgotten how to walk. We still go outside (some of us, sometimes).
But the story's horror doesn't require literal fulfillment. It's enough to recognize the tendencies Forster described: the preference for mediated experience over direct encounter, the trust in systems we don't understand, the gradual acceptance of diminished expectations, the difficulty of imagining alternatives once a technology becomes ubiquitous.
The Machine, in Forster's telling, didn't force humanity underground. Humanity went willingly, one small convenience at a time. That's what makes the story so unsettling. There are no villains. There's no evil conspiracy. There's only the accumulated weight of reasonable choices, each one making the next more likely, until the unthinkable becomes inevitable.
The Fantasy Book Review gave the story a perfect ten out of ten, calling it "dystopic and quite brilliant" and noting that "in such a short novel The Machine Stops holds more horror than any number of gothic ghost stories."
The horror isn't in the collapse. It's in recognizing how easily it could happen—how, in some ways, it already is happening. The Machine hasn't stopped yet. But it's worth asking, every now and then, whether we'd notice if it started to.
Reading Forster Today
The full text of "The Machine Stops" is freely available online through Project Gutenberg and other sources. It's short—around 12,000 words—and can be read in an hour or two. An audiobook version exists through LibriVox for those who prefer to listen.
Forster published the story when he was thirty years old. He would live until 1970, long enough to see television, jet travel, the space race, and the early ARPANET—the predecessor to the internet he'd imagined sixty years earlier. One wonders what he thought, in those final years, watching his fiction edge toward fact.
He never wrote another science fiction story. Perhaps he didn't need to. He'd said what he had to say: that humanity's greatest danger isn't the machines we build, but the parts of ourselves we surrender to them. That warning hasn't aged a day.