Customer Reviews

The Machine Stops

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book during my Junior year of high school and was in awe of it. I feel that this story is good reading for anyone who has concerns about the power computers wield in out lives and for anyone who fears the power they may someday have. I found that it touched upon many aspects of upcoming technology and the possible effects this technology may have on us. I also must say that the last line is the best I have ever read. I won't ruin it for you, read it for yourself.

Forster wrote this book some time before 1914, which is utterly astonishing when you consider the society he portrays in this novel of the future. Flying ships, automated machinery run by computers (although he does not use that word), robotic equipment to maintain and repair society's hardware, are all in their infancy even today, almost a century later. This is science fiction that could have been written in the 1960s or 1990s. I read this book in the early sixties, and assumed at the time that it was contemporary, not realising that it was written before World War 1. I was very pleased to find that it was still available in reprinted form. Highly recommended.

This story stands out in many ways as one of the most prescient pieces of fiction that I've ever read. I'd suggest it to anyone who is interested in holding up a (somewhat distorted) mirror to our society.

That being said, I wouldn't buy this edition. There are typos on almost every page, many of them so obvious that you wonder if they had anyone proof the manuscript before printing. Other typos are subtle and detract from reading the story.

The choice of cover art is also questionable. The picture is of an O'Neill cylinder. While the book does describe humans living in an artificial world, it is nothing like (in function or intent) like the habitat shown on the cover. This normally would be worth noting, except that it shows the general lack of care that went into the book.

E.M. Forester and his story deserve better.

It's amazing to think that this story was written nearly a century ago, when most of the machinery that currently runs our lives hadn't even been invented yet. My son's heading off to college to major in electrical engineering. He'll be working on the Machine, and I'll be sending this story along with him to keep him grounded

(sorry about the pun).

I had read this book many years ago and enjoyed it. The book was written 100 years ago, but does hold some truths of the world today. However, it appears to be a reproduction, the book was rather expensive for what I got - a slim paper back full of typo's

The theme behind this book is that we have become so dependant on machines that they now are apart of us, from our of need to our love for religion. As Y2K appraoches I believe this book will be "taken off the shelves" and examined, for our society is heading down that road that Edward Morgan Forster has suggested in the novel.

I won't go into the merits of the story (I remember it as H.G. Wells meets Isaac Asimov, which counts as high praise)--the main problem with this purchase is that the edition is pitiful. This press (is it even a press?) appears to have discovered that The Machine Stops had passed into the public domain and scrambled so fast to get an edition on the market that they failed to run it past a copy editor, let alone a graphic designer or literary editor. If you're like me and consider books aesthetic objects as well as delivery systems for literature, you might find it worth splurging on the Dodo Press edition and avoiding the CreateSpace copy. Otherwise you might shell out the 99 cents for the Kindle edition, I guess.

Before computers, when I would answer my ringing phone, it wasn't unusual for the response to be, `Oh, you're there. I was hoping to get your machine.' Email relieved the awkwardness of accidentally being forced to confront another human being. It wasn't perfect but it was good-enough.
Imagine a scale that runs from unacceptable to perfect. Along this scale is poor, fair, mediocre, passable, good-enough, good, better, perfect. Sears used to use a scale in its catalogue of good, better, best. They never would have considered calling them good-enough, better and best. But good-enough is the standard now. Think of the Wikis. The best that can be said about them, on their best day, is good-enough. CGI movies, good-enough, or is it that we are amazed that these things can be done at all that permits them to be considered acceptable? Is Toy Story better animation than Roadrunner? Are these things that are good-enough really good enough for you? Don't you want more?
This is the crux of the idea behind The Machine Stops by E.M Forster. In it, The Book Of The Machine is the stand-in for Wikis and other know-it-all sources. If you have a question, in this future dystopia, you turn to this Book for the answer. No matter that The Book is often wrong and always misleading, it is the source of knowledge and the guide for its people. This idea was lifted to comic heights in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, another Book with all the answers that could not be relied on to be correct or even helpful. Are humans destined to need some kind of Book to guide their lives? Like these examples, the internet and the information explosion presents itself as an entity that appears to be expanding while it is actually shrinking. It contracts and encompasses the life around it.
First impressions no longer exist. Each thought is a derivative of a learned thought, each behavior an imitation. In Forster each person lives in a controlled room. Their senses are manipulated, through the environment, to provide the Machine's misguided definition of perfection. He uses the sense of smell as an example. People in his world are appalled and uncomfortable, it all smells so different. They prefer the stimuli in their own room, not the smell, taste or touch of the outside world or others of their own kind. Look around you. Are things so different now? How many television commercials concerned with alerting you to the intolerable aromas around you do you see each week? How far removed from actual experience do the commercials say you have to be in order to be happy?
Read On.

We all know the pervasive stereotype of the digital age: overweight, pasty-faced, living in a darkened basement in front of a constantly flickering screen. And here it is again ...

Except that this short, incisive tale was written & published before World War One, at the very beginning of the 20th Century. From that vantage point, it gazed upon the dawning of the modern age with a clear, clinical eye & foresaw the potentially tragic results. With millions upon millions of people eagerly wired & living as much of their lives as possible online today, how far away are we from the digital hives E. M. Forster depicted with such stunning clarity a century ago? And even more pointedly, how will such people manage if their digital cocoon is abruptly disrupted or even destroyed altogether?

Countless science-fiction writers have since warned us about the dangers of letting our lives be lived by & for our technology. But this remains one of the most potent & urgent iterations of that warning, made all the more powerful for having been written so long ago. How swiftly the digital paradise becomes a crumbling, chaotic hell once the power fails! Yet we still assume in our naiveté & arrogance that we're invincible, that there'll always be enough power for all our technological toys. Forster makes us stop & wonder: How long until we find ourselves in the dark, with the world we knew crashing down upon us?

Highly recommended!

Loved it. Great story, with just the right length, and some almost poetic lines, particularly the last. Highly recommended short story.