In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was routinely cited (alongside such texts as Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun and J.G. Nine years later, Randy Alfred’s Wired article read the story as an allegory for the limits of globalisation. By 2001, when Gregory Norminton adapted the story for BBC Radio 4, it had become a mordant warning about social isolation and gated communities.

Renewed interest in the story followed in the 1990s when it was taken up by cyber-theorists as a prescient account of virtual reality and the World Wide Web. The production complemented other screen-obsessed science fictions of the period, such as Michael Frayn’s A Very Private Life and Nigel Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics (both 1968). Then, the story’s tale of a world state in which the inhabitants live inside vast underground cities, isolated from one another except for an electronic mass communications network overseen by the titular ‘Machine’, commented upon a burgeoning screen culture. The story has long been a staple of science fiction anthologies and, in 1966, it was filmed by Philip Savile for the BBC’s anthology series, Out of the Unknown. The meaning of ‘The Machine Stops’ has proved remarkably multivalent. At the same time, though, Forster’s sole foray into scientific romance has grown in stature since the early 1990s. Too many Merchant and Ivory productions, perhaps. With the exception of his novel, A Passage to India (1924), which remains of interest to postcolonial scholars, Forster’s standing has slipped within the academy. Forster’s fable, ‘The Machine Stops’, which was first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909.

The science fiction tale not only comments upon a burgeoning screen culture but also on our diminishing capacity to visualise and share an alternative reality, writes Paul March-Russel. Forster’s 1909 fable, ‘The Machine Stops’ - which depicts a world state in which the inhabitants live inside vast underground cities, isolated from one another except for an electronic mass communications network - is a powerful story of technological alienation.

Forster the machine stops