The Machine Stops
By E.M. Forster
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E.M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist, short story writer and essayist best known for his books A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). The only child of parents Edward and Lily Forster, young Edward lost his father to tuberculosis before he turned two. Lily and Edward subsequently moved to a country house in Hertfordshire called Rooks Nest, which served as a model for the eponymous house in the book Howards End. Edward inherited a considerable sum of money that allowed him to embark on a career as a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent and then went to King's College in Cambridge where he joined a secret society known as the Apostles, several members of which later helped form the Bloomsbury Group, a literary/philosophical society that boasted such early members as Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell. Upon graduation, Forster went abroad - often escorted by his mother - and wrote of his travels extensively. Upon his return, he set up residence in Weybridge, Surrey where he would write all six of his novels. All of his books were written between 1908 and 1924 and his last, A Passage to India, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Forster was a homosexual and while he never married, he did have several affairs with male lovers during his lifetime, including a forty-year romance with married policeman Bob Buckingham, at whose home he collapsed and died at age 91 of a stroke. Forster explored his struggle with his own sexuality in his book Maurice. Forster was extremely critical of American foreign policy during his lifetime and rebuffed efforts to film adaptations of his novels due to the fact that the productions would likely use American financing. After his death, however, several of his books were made into films and three of them - A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India are among the most highly regarded films of the late 20th century.
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The Machine Stops - E.M. Forster
Chapter I
THE AIR-SHIP
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk--that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh--a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
I suppose I must see who it is
, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.
Who is it?
she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:
Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes--for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on 'Music during the Australian Period'.
She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.
Be quick!
She called, her irritation returning. Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.
But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.
Kuno, how slow you are.
He smiled gravely.
I really believe you enjoy dawdling.
I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.
What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?
Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want--
Well?
I want you to come and see me.
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
But I can see you!
she exclaimed. What more do you want?
I want to see you not through the Machine,
said Kuno. I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.
Oh, hush!
said his mother, vaguely shocked. You mustn't say anything against the Machine.
Why not?
One mustn't.
You talk as if a god had made the Machine,
cried the other. I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.
"The air-ship barely takes two days to