“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.”
At last, I have got round to reading E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. This book has been on my To Read list forever, even though it’s only about 40 pages long. It’s a thoroughly engaging science-fiction novella, summarising Forster’s concerns about humanity’s ever increasing reliance on technology.
Set in a futuristic world where everyone lives underground, surrounded by comforts brought to them by the Machine, the book follows Vashti, who has become fully engrossed with the Machine and everything it provides, and her son Kuno, who denounces this way of living with horror.
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.”