The Machine Stops Study Guide

Forster was born in London in 1879. His father, an architect, died of tuberculosis when he was a baby, so he was raised by his mother and aunts. From 1897 to 1901, he attended Cambridge University, studying classics and history. After graduation, he worked as a lecturer at the Working Men’s College, Cambridge, and the University of London. In 1905, he published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, followed by The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with A View (1908), and Howards End (1910). In 1911, Forster published The Celestial Omnibus, his first collection of short stories. In 1912, he visited India, an experience that would later inspire A Passage to India (1924) and The Hill of Devi (1953). In 1913, his encounter with the openly gay socialist activist Edward Carpenter inspired his posthumously published novel of homosexual love, Maurice (1971). During the First World War, he worked for the Red Cross’s Wounded and Missing Bureau in Egypt. After the war, he briefly worked as a newspaper writer and editor, before again visiting India, where he worked as a private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas from 1921-22. His final novel, A Passage to India (1924), received widespread critical acclaim. In 1926, he started a relationship with a London policeman, Harry Daley. He published a book on writing, Aspects of the Novel, in 1927. His second story collection, The Eternal Moment, was published in 1928. In 1934, he became president of the National Council for Civil Liberties. He published two essay collections, Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). During the Second World War, he broadcasted anti-Nazi talks for the BBC, and after the war wrote the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. He died in 1970. Many of his unpublished novels and short stories were published following his death.

“The Machine Stops” was written at a time of rapid technological change. Major innovations of this period included the telephone (1876), the radio (1895), the phonograph (1877), films (1895), cars (1886), and airplanes (1903). Many of the features of the society in “The Machine Stops”—long-distance video calling, on-demand musical recordings, remote lectures, air-ships—are simply more advanced developments of these technologies that already existed in rudimentary form at the time of the story’s writing (1909). The dystopian world of “The Machine Stops” therefore is, on one level, a pessimistic reflection on the dramatic societal transformations that the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) was causing at the time of its writing. “The Machine Stops” is not only inspired by the technological changes that were taking place at the turn of the twentieth century, but also by the accompanying ideological changes. Older belief systems, such as traditional religion, and older ways of life, with its close connection to natural rhythms, were being replaced by a new emphasis on rationality and factory-like efficiency. These ideological transformations of the modern era are reflected in the ideologies and social structures of the futuristic society in “The Machine Stops.” In this way, the story is as much a commentary on Forster’s own time as it is a cautionary tale of what humanity could become.

“The Machine Stops” is the only science fiction work published by E.M. Forster. Most of Forster’s novels and short stories, by contrast, are realistic social commentaries, often critiquing contemporary England or British colonialism, such as his three most famous novels, A Room with A View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. However, Forster did incorporate speculative and fantastical elements in other short stories, such as “The Celestial Omnibus” and “The Story of the Siren.” Forster wrote “The Machine Stops” as a direct response to the science fiction works of H.G. Wells, writing in the introduction of his Collected Short Stories that the story was “a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H.G. Wells.” Forster may have been reacting to the futuristic worlds that Wells depicted in The Time Machine (1896) or A Modern Utopia (1905), offering a much bleaker vision of technological progress than that provided by Wells. As an early example of the dystopian fiction genre, “The Machine Stops” shares similarities with later works in this tradition, such as We (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 (1949) by George Orwell.