![]() ![]() There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. ![]() Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. Every need and want is provided by The Machine. In the future all humanity lives in cells under the ground, cocooned in complete isolation from each other and content to communicate via telescreens. I was surprised by how little I was surprised by the sci-fi future depicted in The Machine Stops. Wells.’ Maybe he’s referring to Wells’s A Modern Utopia, published in 1905, though it’s an odd to speak of it being a ‘reaction’ because Wells was just as capable of portraying dystopias as utopias, The Time Machine (1895) being the first in a long line which portray the future as not at all idyllic. ![]() In the preface to his Collected Short Stories, Forster sardonically commented that ‘ The Machine Stops is a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. And yet his short story, The Machine Stops (1909), regularly appears in lists of top sci-fi stories. Foster isn’t a name you associate with science fiction, his line being more stories about middle-class young ladies in Florence or Surrey. ![]()
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