"The Machine Stops"

E, M. Forster in his novella "The Machine Stops" tells of a man in a futuristic society who escapes from the machine, from the interconnectedness of technology, to escape back to the world of the living, the world of the surface of the earth. This is what is meant by "the machine stops," for the machine does not stop at all--it is the machine that the man has become that stops. Forster sees into the future with amazing accuracy. He offers in his story a number of examples of technology which he projects from his time in 1909, and he "creates" various inventions that we have today. More significantly, however, he sees what the machine will mean to society and what it will do to the individual, and this is his warning in this story. He creates a society where human beings are less capable and less important than machines, and he shows how the machines that have been created to help have come to be the masters, leaving the human beings more like machines than the machines themselves.

The mechanisms that Orwell discusses are based on what he knew of the technology of his time and on a certain sense of what the future might bring. He knew of the electric light, for instance, but his electric light in the story is of a more advanced design. He knew of the telegraph and the telephone, and he looked into the future when people could communicate visually as well as aurally over a wire, as his characters do as they stand before the glowing plate and speak to one another. The

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