In this short story, Forster picks up all these innovations and extrapolates on what life could be if all of them, taken as a whole, were to be perfected and generalized beyond control. These all have in common that they radically changed our relation to the world and practically inverted our place in Nature: it is no longer sunlight that wakes us, it is our waking that summons the light, at the flick of a switch: “She made the room dark and slept she awoke and made the room light” (p5). In 1909, Western progress reaches what could be considered its peak (at least in originality), and a series of firsts shake the intellectual life: first (arguably) public moving picture screening in 1895, first manned flight in 1903, first transatlantic radio broadcasting in 1906, first line-assembly factory, first electricity-powered households, etc. In this fixed society, which mirrors the English society of the early 20 th century, one young man, Kuno, ponders about life outside and attempts to get out of the Machine. It recounts the fall of a society living nursed in “the Machine”, a global mechanical system built to answer each and every immediate needs of all individuals, and which has since taken its independence and has pursued this task on its own for ages. The Machine Stops is a short-story written by British writer E.M.
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