It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after galley with its wings of steel. An airship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. Humanity has learnt its lesson.'Īs he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. 'Oh, tomorrow - some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.' Today they are the Homeless - tomorrow -' They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilisation stops. He replied: 'I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. 'But, Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this - this tunnel, this poisoned darkness - really not the end?' As the two of them die, however, they at least have the satisfaction of seeing the possibility of escape from the Machine's mechanical womb.

Her reluctance to do so spells her own doom.

Kuno wants his mother to accompany him outside, where he is sure that he once saw some living human beings. Now, however, the machine has started to falter, to lag in its daily attentions to the human parasites that infest it. His protagonist, Vashti, is largely content with her situation, and displays nothing but irritation at the attempts of her son, Kuno, to interest her in the forbidden regions outside.Įverything - nourishment, entertainment, contact - is supplied by the Machine, which is now the main deity worshipped by mankind, despite having been originally designed to serve them. Forster in his long short story 'The Machine Stops,' first published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909.įorster envisages a world where people live cocooned in little cells, with audiovisual contact with one another, and minimal travel from place to place. Clearly I'm not the first one to notice the extraordinary prescience shown by E.

The machine stops and other stories