The Machine Stops: Part I

The 1909 sci-fi story that predicted an emasculating technocracy

‘Fantasies always tell the future,’ said Jonathan Bowden. And although E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) isn’t as famous as 1984 or Brave New World, it’s more prophetic than both combined. Before the invention of the internet, it predicted the emergence of an emasculating technocracy. In the world of the story, strength is spurned. Fathers are absent. And men must fight to recover their connection to their physicality and their ancestors.

It explores the relationship between Vashti and Kuno, a mother-child dyad. This is the fundamental social unit all collapsing cultures are reduced to — as in the ghetto — and at the end of the story night falls on ‘civilization’s long day’. Vashti is named after the Persian queen who was executed or banished for refusing to appear at her husband’s banquet. Harriet Beecher Stowe said this was the "first stand for woman's rights”: Vashti is regarded as a feminist icon. Whereas Vashti’s sense of family is weak, Kuno’s name in German means ‘clan’ or ‘kinship’. And although his father is absent and he’s not permitted to become one (the Machine regards his masculine type as too atavistic), he nevertheless struggles to nurture his mother’s lost sense of her ancestors.

The story begins in Vashti’s ‘small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee.’ In Greece, the bee was emblematic of work and obedience. Although humans obey the Machine, the deeper meaning is that bees, like the humans in this story, are eusocial: they exhibit not only cooperative brood care but overlapping generations within a colony of adults and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. Thus ‘The Machine Stops’ explores the breakdown of the nuclear family, the final bulwark against totalitarianism.

It also explores the relationship between spiritual and physical breakdown. A ‘swaddled lump of flesh’, Vashti feels safe in her cell. She has everything she wants — artificial light, artificial air, everything at the press of a button. But ‘lump’ shows her body has suffered from lack of use. And her face, ‘white as a fungus’ because she’s been inside for so long, hints at death. Comfort can kill. Civilisations throughout history have fallen because of it.

Her doorbell rings. Having already been interrupted many times while trying to listen to music, she’s irritated. ‘She knew several thousand people’ because ‘in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.’ It is our world of ceaseless notifications. Even though it’s her own son wanting to speak to her on a video call, she feels ‘her irritation returning.’ He complains that she is ‘always busy or isolated’ and wants to see her — speak to her — ‘not through the wearisome Machine’.

He wants to ‘talk about the hopes’ in his mind. Shocked, she warns him that he ‘mustn’t say anything against the Machine.’ But he reminds her not to talk ‘as if a god had made the Machine…Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything.’ Unlike Vashti, Kuno is alert to the danger of idolising technology. He tells his mother the stars have given him an idea. ‘I dislike the stars’, she says, but she humours him, asking what the idea was:

‘I had an idea that they were like a man.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘The four big stars are the man's shoulders and his knees. The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three stars hanging are like a sword.’

‘A sword?’

‘Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other men.’

The sword symbolises the strength of his ancestors that Kuno, emasculated by an environment that has supplanted men’s role as providers and protectors, yearns to recover. (It even, as we will see, interferes with men as procreators.) He longs to leave the Machine and see the earth and sky as they did, but Vashti rebukes him. ‘It is contrary to the spirit of the age’. Physicality, muscles, adventure — all that is a thing of the past.

Frustrated, Kuno leaves the call. And so the tension between mother and child develops: technology comes between them. Although Vashti feels lonely for a moment, she reaches for the Book of the Machine, ‘a survival from the ages of litter’, the era when people still read printed matter:

Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if some one might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured 'O Machine! O Machine!' and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence.

Aptly, ‘delirium’ means, literally, ‘go off the furrow.' It’s a plowing metaphor, and Vashti has lost touch with nature. She no longer even notices the hum of the machine because ‘she had been born with it in her ears’. This ‘acquiescence’ is a stupor of the spirit. Facing the prospect of visiting Kuno, she is ‘seized with the terrors of direct experience’ and tells him she can’t come.

But she can’t resist his request. Her maternal instincts remain:

She thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his removal to the public nurseries, her own visit to him there, his visits to her – visits which stopped when the Machine had assigned him a room on the other side of the earth. 'Parents, duties of,' said the book of the Machine,' cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483.' True, but there was something special about Kuno – indeed there had been something special about all her children – and, after all, she must brave the journey if he desired it.

In the Israeli kibbutzim and the Soviet Union, it was the women who resisted the men’s socialist plans for communal childrearing. By focusing on the mother-child dyad (we know nothing of Kuno’s father), Forster shows how human nature resists attempts to remodel it. ‘The human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine.’

So Vashti commits to visiting Kuno, but travel terrifies her. Due to advances in technology and the uniformity of the world all over, ‘men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.’ At least the manual labourer sleeps well. The comfort of civilisation is also its curse — not just physically, manifesting in weakness and anxiety, but spiritually because of pride. They dismiss the wisdom of the past:

Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

In the Bible, Leviathan is ‘a king over all the children of pride’. No man can command him. But the aim of the Enlightenment was to make men ‘masters and possessors of nature’ (Francis Bacon). A symbol of God’s creative power, Leviathan is subjugated here. But only ostensibly: although technology makes man feel master of nature, including even human nature, reality reveals this to be a delusion of grandeur.

Boarding the airship to visit Kuno, Vashti notices a man drop the sacred Book. His muscles ‘had failed him’, and rather than pick up the book he feels them in shock while Vashti, panicked, treads on its pages as she walks past. Foreshadowing the collapse of the Machine, it is a symbolic moment, yet Vashti still turns to her own copy for comfort as proximity to other humans produces ‘spasms of rage’ in her: ‘Vashti was afraid. “O Machine!” she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was comforted.’

The windows are open because ‘when the air-ships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world’, but they are soon shut at the request of the passengers. The discomfort they feel is ‘proportionate’ to how ‘civilised and refined’ they are. Nature no longer nourishes them. They despise it.

In an echo of the Icarus myth, the narrator describes how ‘the aim of the civilisation preceding this’ had been to ‘outstrip’ the sun. ‘Racing aeroplanes had been built for the purpose, capable of enormous speed, and steered by the greatest intellects of the epoch.’ But ‘horrible accidents occurred’, and it was made illegal.

Yet this was a loss:

the attempt to 'defeat the sun' aroused the last common interest that our race experienced about the heavenly bodies, or indeed about anything. It was the last time that men were compacted by thinking of a power outside the world. The sun had conquered, yet it was the end of his spiritual dominion. Dawn, midday, twilight, the zodiacal path, touched neither men's lives not their hearts, and science retreated into the ground, to concentrate herself upon problems that she was certain of solving.

When science was redefined to exclude traditional metaphysics, it ‘retreated into the ground’ — into a world of mere mathematical manipulation devoid of meaning and purpose. All knowledge had to be remodelled according to what could be quantified. Problems this new science was not ‘certain of solving’ according to this method were dismissed as belonging to the dark ages. Thus when the sun’s light — light was God’s first creation — threatens to touch Vashti’s face through a crack in the blind, she feels ‘a spasm of horror. Like a vampire, she recoils. The sun’s ‘spiritual dominion’ is supposed to be over.

The flight attendant responds ‘barbarically’ by putting out ‘her hand to steady her.’ Vashti is horrified because the custom of touching each other is now obsolete. The passengers regard each other with ‘an almost physical repulsion’. Vashti is the only one travelling by choice; others are being sent to replace people who’ve died in their cells in other parts of the world; one man is being ‘sent to Sumatra for the purpose of propagating the race.’

But when Vashti asks where they are in the journey, the attendant opens the blind a little to show her the Himalayas:

'They were once called the Roof of the World, those mountains.'

'You must remember that, before the dawn of civilization, they seemed to be an impenetrable wall that touched the stars. It was supposed that no one but the gods could exist above their summits. How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!'

'How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!' said Vashti.

'How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!' echoed the passenger who had dropped his Book the night before, and who was standing in the passage.

'And that white stuff in the cracks? – what is it?'

'I have forgotten its name.'

'Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas.’

As with the harnessing of Leviathan, flying over the Himalayas makes them feel like gods. Nature is an irrelevant annoyance. What’s snow? It no longer inspires. And not only do the books of the past mean nothing to Vashti — they’re ‘false as the prattle of a child’ — but she has also lost the ability to read what St. Augustine and the other Church Fathers called the book of nature.

there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you: “God made me!”

In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demons want to keep men away from nature.

But for Vashti there are ‘no ideas here.’ And so she hides ‘Greece behind a metal blind.’ This is symbolic. The imagery of ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ and ‘a golden sea’ echoes Homer. Greece was the birthplace of philosophy and — with its emphasis on monotheism, free will and virtue — prepared the world for the Christian revelation. (St Jerome called the Greek philosophers ‘Christians before Christ’.) Vashti notes that the ‘masses of black rock’ she sees from the window just before the blind is drawn resemble a ‘a prostrate man’. When Greece is dismissed, man is flattened to matter. Reduced to the physical, man the metaphysical animal is mangled.

And yet prostrate ironically hints at submission, supplication, worship. Despite their sedulous attempts to avoid religion, the people idolise the Machine. Man must bow down to something. But the Machine, like all idols, is unworthy of worship, as the subsequent sections of the story show: the stars will speak again to Kuno has he fights to see ‘the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.’