In E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” the author delivers a subversive vision of a mechanized utopia, where mankind has been provided a constant life of comfort and pleasure by machinery. It seems like a good bargain – until the reader discovers how these future citizens live and what they’ve been deprived of. Here, Forster makes a bold statement in implying technology – used to it’s fullest, maximum potential – would be an opiate for the masses. If technology is invented to make life easier for humans, what happens if humans become completely dependent on these machines? As good science fiction should, Forster’s short story forces me to criticize the society depicted – not technology – to blame.
In Forster’s world, a series of unexplained events led this future mankind to choose a life ruled by technology. The machines aren’t the ones subjecting mankind to live indoors, eat pills for food, or become agoraphobic – it is the central government, Big Brother, who dictates how people should live their stifled lives. Through indoctrination, the humans depicted in Forster’s world have become so conditioned that to imagine a world of the unknown (nature) is more terrifying then the known (mechanized). Over generations of time, this utopian society never questions the government’s decision to permanently live underground and not attempt to restore the Earth’s surface by using technology.
The only challenger to this notion is Kuno, the son of Vashti, a scholar who is content with her lifestyle. Kuno, himself, is a dissatisfied citizen. Through her eyes, we witness Kuno’s defiance against his society’s conventional norms, his tale of escaping to the Earth’s surface, and his punishment when he is returned forcibly back underground. Despite hearing his story, Vashti is unmoved. She is a symbolic lemming in a society where nobody questions authority because they prefer the comfort that it doles out. To question otherwise is to face death by homelessness (i.e., being ejected to the Earth’s surface to suffocate in it’s poisoned atmosphere).
Vashti and Kuno are victims of a society where technology has been used to control and deny people the chance to move freely and make decisions independent of what their government allows. The machines are depicted as automatons that provide these humans everything – transportation, housing, entertainment, etc. How the humans choose to conduct themselves is left to them. In this case, people only interact over screens, they do not engage in bodily contact, and sex only comes as a result of perfunctory reproduction for the benefit of the human race. The machinery, itself, is in the background. Ultimately, while the failure of the machinery led to the demise of this human colony, it was really their government’s decisions that led them to that path of destruction in the first place.
