The Machine Stops

A brilliant Prescient book Prescient book anticipating Alexa Siri and other speakers And technology that we will have Way before it was even invented. Beautiful pros ! Not happy. Not for the tain of heart Highly recommended.

Outstanding! I cannot believe the original was published in 1909. It could have been written today.

Well written and a gem for provoking thought. I will recommend to anyone specially scifi readers. Is short and full of meaning.

Can writers write the future? I once said that the future is like a Magic 8 Ball. You never know the outcome until you’re done shaking it up, but what if the variables don’t apply to everyone? What if someone pricked a small hole in a loose-leaf paper, can’t do that on the screen, and they peered through that hole? And they saw what was coming our way. E.M. Forster nailed that one with his story, The Machine Stops. Give it a hundred years or so, and they saw what was coming our way. Welcome to the Internet. Hello, Social Media. Praise the Machine, and we are definitely cogs in the machine that have led us to today. Sadly, I don’t think there is escape, and if, when the Machine stops, there will be chaos. No one will know how to live especially in silence, and the silence could be deafening. And one could only hope as the world caves in around you, that somehow, we survive.

This is a new favorite for me. It is short, but filled with astute observations of human nature when presented with assistive and convenience technology, especially full automation. Originally published in 1909, this work pointed to the future that we are still foolishly running toward. "...all unrest was concentrated on the soul." I will be happy to use this story as a comparable for my latest novel. My only complaint is for this specific printing. There are a lot of typos and formatting issues, which make it a little more challenging to read. I was able to decipher most of the trouble spots, but some were confusing. Sloppy printing.

The incredible accuracy which with this brilliant author has been able to 'nail' us as a species in 2016 is uncanny, even though the book was written over one hundred years ago in the early 20th century. One of the most insightful 50 page science fiction books ever written. Highly recommended ... but be prepared for some irritating typos in this edition..

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster inspired me to doodle this picture. The words on page 11, “The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars” are striking to me although written at the beginning of the 20th century. We are surrounded by the noise of today’s machines, blind to our planet’s (well)being. The noise is tuning us out. The message I got from this book: we need to connect back to our origin - Earth - to save humanity. Good read. Oh, and it’s only 40+ pages long.

This is more a long short-story than a novel, and for sure too much of it serves as exposition. So in strictly "literary" terms its more of a "3 star" book on those grounds. And the funny thing is, I'm guessing that until the last decade or so much of what it posits must have seemed more a fanciful "what if?" scenario than anything else. Except... here we are, billions of us glued to the screens of phones and tablets, many of us avoiding real physical interactions as much as possible in favor of those mediated by screens. How the man who wrote A Room with a View could have had the foresight to predict such a world is nothing short of astounding. My guess is his storyline somehow was extrapolated from the newest technology of his time: the telephone. The Machine in this book, what we today know as an AI (Artificial Intelligence) most closely resembles a substitute for God (the Anglican, Patrician version the author was most familiar with). Much of the other technology featured are logical extensions of what was happening in the early 20th century. And of course many authors in Great Britain were concerned about environmental destruction (TS Elliot, Tolkien, and others) but again, Forster seems especially prescient. All in all, a fascinating exercise in dystopian speculation, and probably an evening's worth of reading for most adults.

Incredible story. Scary when you think about where we are at today.

Excelente! Surpreendente ter sido escrito em 1909!

Visionario, increíble la similitud entre lo soñado hace un siglo y lo vivido hoy en día.

Das Buch beschreibt eine Gesellschaft, die nur noch im virtuellen Raum lebt. Das wird von dem Sohn der Protagonistin durchbrochen, aber trotzdem beschleicht einen beim Lesen immer wieder da sGefühl, dass wir uns in diese Richgung bewegen, durch KI schneller als je zuvor. Dieses Buch gehört als "Drittes im Bunde" zu "1984" von Orwell und "Schöne Neue Welt" von Huxley.

A more important warning than ever from the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st century. When I first read this at school, there was no internet/social media etc. and even then it was easy to understand what Forster was getting at...another brick in his wall of Only Connect (physically that is).