People live in perpetual "isolation", in technological caverns and with fear of surfacing. "Public meetings" have long been left behind , replaced by "pneumatic mail" and a video interface. Everything is under the control of The Machine, which controls social networks and regulates permissions to go outside, after using a "respirator" to cushion the impact of the real world ...

All this was imagined by the British writer EM Forster in 1909 in a short story entitled The Machine Stops (Salmon Editions), which has taken on a disturbing dimension during the confinement of the coronavirus. The author of Passage to India or A Room with a View , catapulted to fame by James Ivory's adaptations of the cinema, is being rediscovered by his compatriots in their dimension of prophetic and dystopian author.

BBC art editor Will Gompertz has dived into the time tunnel and has rescued Forster's account these days as "an amazing, shocking and amazingly accurate literary description of quarantined life in 2020." "If it had been written today it would still be excellent," says Gompertz. "The fact that it was written over a century ago makes it surprising."

The machine deepens into the relationship of a mother and a son, Vashti and Kuno, geographically separated and connected through The Machine. Vashti is conformist, resigned to the "social distancing" imposed by technology in those spaces where humans live confined. Kuno is hedonistic and rebellious, eager to regain human interaction and willing to risk everything to surface.

Details of the cover of the book 'The machine stops' by EM Forster.WORLD

Straddling HG Wells and George Orwell , Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) entered the realm of anticipatory literature with this 12,300-word account, initially contained in the collection Eternal Moment and Other Stories. Until then, Forster was mostly known as a furious critic of English classism and hypocrisy (A Year Later, Return to Howards End would be published ).

The machine came to a standstill in the same year that Marinetti published his Futuristic Manifesto and broke a lance due to the impetuous advance of the machine. EM Forster decided to take more cautiously what we would today call "technological disruption" and, in fact, became President of the Association of British Humanists.

"Science, instead of liberating man, is making him a slave to machines, " Forster wrote in his journal. "The human being may obtain a new and perhaps greater soul under these new conditions. But souls like mine will be crushed.

This struggle is in some way a reflection of the pulse that Forster himself (1879-1970) released with modern times: «Humanity, in its search for material well-being, had gone too far. He had over-exploited the riches of nature, and progress had come to mean the progress of the machine.

As Javier Rodríguez Hidalgo points out in the prologue to the Spanish edition, Forster was "a humanist who, like the heroes of his fictions, observed perplexed transformations that did not allow us to predict anything good ". Faced with critics who consider The machine stands as a brief rarity (why did he not develop such a fascinating plot in a novel?), Rodríguez Hidalgo sees a common thread between the rebel Kuno, the Fielding of Passage to India or the Schlegel sisters in Return to Howards End : "Desertion, disobedience, the refusal to accept the dictation of laws that appear with the appearance of the irrevocable."

And as proof he refers us to the final pages, also premonitory of Return to Howards End : "This madness for mobility has appeared in the last 100 years. It may come later a civilization that is not all movement, because it will remain on the ground."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • literature
  • Lockdown
  • Lack of confidence
  • UK
  • Coronavirus
  • culture

Covid-19Autocines reappear in Catalonia due to the coronavirus crisis

Literature Charles Dickens' problem with women: from hatred of his mother to cruelty to his wife

Literature The phenomenon of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: the worldwide success of Spanish literature

See links of interest

  • Last News
  • English translator
  • TV programming
  • Quixote
  • Work calendar
  • Daily horoscope
  • Santander League Ranking
  • League calendar
  • TV Movies
  • Themes
  • Levante - Real Sociedad
  • Tottenham Hotspur - Everton
  • Seville - Eibar