In a future human society, everyone lives in separate, underground rooms, where all

their needs and wants are provided by “the Machine.” One day, a woman, Vashti,
receives a call from her son Kuno asking her to visit him in person. She doesn’t see
the point of visiting him, since they can communicate just as easily through the
Machine. Kuno wants to visit the earth’s surface (which is now apparently incapable
of supporting life), a desire that Vashti, who is perfectly content living underground
with the aid of the Machine, doesn’t understand. Kuno criticizes Vashti for
worshipping the Machine as if it were a divine being. Later, Kuno tells Vashti that he
will not talk to her anymore until she comes to visit him. She reluctantly decides to
travel on an air-ship to the other side of the world where her son lives.

Onboard the air-ship, Vashti is distressed by the need to talk to and touch other
people, and she is entirely uninterested in the natural scenery below. When she arrives
in her son’s room, angry at him for making her undergo such a worthless trip, he tells
her that he has been threatened with “Homelessness”—a form of execution in which
the victim is placed on the earth’s surface without protective equipment, killing them.
Kuno tells Vashti the story of how he escaped to the earth’s surface through a
ventilation shaft and stayed there for a short time, fascinated by the natural world
around him, before being drawn back underground by the Machine’s Mending
Apparatus. Feeling that her son’s deviations are unforgivable, Vashti leaves and rarely
talks to him again.

In the following years, respirators (protective equipment) are abolished, making it

impossible to visit the earth’s surface. Meanwhile, the Machine is increasingly
worshipped as a god. Kuno calls Vashti and tells her that “the Machine is stopping,” a
statement that makes no sense to her. Defects start to appear in the Machine’s system,
such as flaws in the music, fruit, beds, and other objects that the Machine summons.
These defects become worse as time goes on, sparking outrage and panic in the
society. The Committee of the Machine reveals that the Mending Apparatus itself has
been broken.

One day, the ultimate disaster strikes, and the Machine stops entirely. All lines of
communication are cut, and the air and light start to dissipate, condemning all the
people living underground to certain death. As Vashti watches the crowds of people
dying around her, she reunites with Kuno. He says there is no hope for them, but there
are still humans living above-ground—“the Homeless”—who will carry on after this
calamity, now that humanity has learned its lesson about the Machine. Vashti realizes
that her son has been right all along about the Machine’s destructive impact on
humanity. Vashti and Kuno embrace as an air-ship crashes into the city, destroying it
and killing them.

The Machine Stops’ (1909) is probably E. M. Forster’s best-

known short story. The story’s influence can arguably be seen
on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.

Like many other dystopian stories, Forster’s has gone on to

influence popular culture in numerous fields (the pop group
Level 42 even wrote a song about it) and it has been
pronounced one of the best-ever science-fiction stories on
several occasions. Forster himself wrote ‘The Machine Stops’
as a response to one of H. G. Wells’s utopian novels
(probably A Modern Utopia, published in 1905).
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Forster responded by offering a dystopian vision of mankind’s

future, a bleak analysis of our over-reliance upon, and
eventual subordination to, modern technology. You can read
the story here before proceeding to our summary and analysis
below; you can also get hold of other Forster stories by
investing in the excellent edition of his short fiction, Collected
Short Stories (Twentieth Century Classics S.).

‘The Machine Stops’: summary

First, a brief summary of the plot of ‘The Machine Stops’. In

the future, mankind dwells underground where they rely on
the Machine for all their needs. Everyone owns a book,
referred to as ‘the Book’, which is not a bible but rather a sort
of instruction manual telling people about the Machine.

The narrator tells us that the ‘clumsy business of public

gatherings had been long since abandoned’. People stay in
their own rooms, under the ground, and interact via
technology – living a virtual rather than face-to-face existence
in both their education and socialising. People ‘isolate
themselves’ when they go to sleep, unplugging themselves
from this technological world of telecommunication.

A mother and lecturer, Vashti, who lives in the southern

hemisphere, talks to her son Kuno, who is in the northern
hemisphere, via a round plate which functions as a sort of
videophone. Kuno wants his mother to come and visit him
where he lives in the northern hemisphere, as he wishes to
experience the stars, not from an airship, but while standing
on the surface of the earth and directly exposed to them.
However, Vasthi vacillates and initially refuses to go to see
him, as she is reluctant to leave her room.

Eventually, Vashti gives in and arranges to go and visit her

son, and makes the journey via an airship. We are told that
few people travel anywhere these days, because everywhere
on the planet is virtually identical to everywhere else. Airships
have been preserved from a former age when people used to
travel to visit things, whereas now everything is brought to
them in their rooms. Vashti’s journey reminds her of her
‘horror of direct experience’: leaving her bubble or cocoon,
the safety and familiarity of her room, and going out and
being among other people causes her to become anxious.

When she arrives, Kuno tells her why he insisted on her

travelling to see him: because he has something to tell her
which he couldn’t tell her through the Machine. He is being
threatened with ‘Homelessness’ (a euphemism which means
death, since nobody can survive outside of the Machine) for
daring to make his way out onto the surface of the Earth by
himself, demonstrating personal agency and
independence. People are allowed up to the surface, but only
under supervised and permitted conditions. Kuno has gone
rogue by venturing out there by himself.
Kuno chastises his mother for worshipping the Machine, and
they argue. He tells her about how he discovered that his
room is located below Wessex, in south-west England, and
that he climbed up onto the earth and saw the hills as the
Anglo-Saxons had seen them in the long-forgotten past. He
had reconnected with nature and with the land, land which he
had only been able to experience as history, through lectures,
before. He learned that there are people who live outside of
the Machine’s control.

However, mysterious ‘worms’ pursued him and ensnared him,

bringing him back underground and back to the Machine.
Knocked unconscious, he woke up to find himself back in his
room.

Vashti returns home, thinking her son mad. In the ensuing

years, respirators – which allow people to safely visit the
surface of the earth – are abolished, with leading academics
calling ‘first-hand ideas’ a mirage, since it is better to get
information about the surface of the earth safely from
‘gramophone’ recordings or what Forster calls the
‘cinematophote’ (i.e., film recordings or moving pictures).
Second-hand or even tenth-hand ideas are better than direct
experience, these lecturers argue.

Another development that takes place is the re-establishment

of religion, with the Machine being worshipped as a god.
Vashti herself has lost all sense of the meaning of life:
delivering a bad lecture is enough for her to long for
euthanasia.

Vashti loses all contact with her son, until she receives a
message from him one day. He has been transferred to the
southern hemisphere, to a room close to her own, as a result
of his transgressions. He utters to her the cryptic words ‘the
Machine stops’, arguing that the Machine – on which everyone
is now wholly dependent – is slowing down and grinding to a
halt.

But when Vashti does complain to the Committee of the

Mending Apparatus, having perceived that the music she
teaches is ‘imperfect’ as the Machine provides her with it, she
is fobbed off and merely told that her complaint will be
‘forwarded in its turn’. Others receive the same answer when
they file a complaint.

Eventually, just as the population had accepted ‘good

enough’ as an acceptable standard for everything in their
lives, people come to accept these flaws (such as smelly bath
water, imperfect poetry, and sullied music recordings) as part
and parcel of their lives.

Forster’s narrator tells us that the event which triggered the

‘collapse of humanity’, however, was when people’s beds
failed to materialise in their rooms when they were
summoned. From there, everything gets worse, with lecturers
reassuring everyone that things are sufficient and the
population should just carry on without sleep or clean air or
light. Eventually, as things descend further, there is, Forster’s
narrator tells us, ‘hysterical talk’ of ‘measures’ and
‘provisional dictatorship’. Then the whole communication
system shuts down.

People panic and pray in their desperation to the Machine, but

it’s no good: man, the narrator tells us, is ‘dying in the
garments that he had woven’. Vashti finds Kuno, who, like her,
is dying, but before they join the legions of the dead, Kuno
tells Vashti that he has seen and lived among those who
survive above-ground – the so-called Homeless – and that,
although he and his mother will perish, the human race will
survive, having learnt its lesson.