E.M. Forester’s The Machine Stops is a classic of science fiction. Not because it sounds like a writer pondering the end-state of our technological society but because it does just that from all the way back in 1909. The prescience of Forester was incredible!

From Wikipedia:

The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a ‘cell’, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as ‘unmechanized’ and are threatened with “Homelessness”. Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end.

Essentially it predicts: Google, Facebook, online university courses, video conferencing, collapse, the uniformity of our built environment and more.

You can read the entire story here. Or you can listen to the audio.

My favorite passage:

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body – it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend – glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

‘Where are you?’ she sobbed.

His voice in the darkness said, ‘Here.’

Is there any hope, Kuno?’

‘None for us.’

‘Where are you?’

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.

‘Quicker,’ he gasped, ‘I am dying – but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.’

He kissed her.

‘We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Aelfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl.’

‘But Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this – tunnel, this poisoned darkness – really not the end?’

He replied:

‘I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the midst and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless – tomorrow—– ‘

‘Oh, tomorrow – some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.’

‘Never,’ said Kuno, ‘never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.’