The Machine Stops and Other Stories

In a future where all humanity lives underground in identical hexagonal cells, every need is met by a vast global Machine — food, medicine, music, communication — a system fusing the internet, social media, video calls, food delivery and healthcare. People have ceased to travel, ceased to touch, and lecture each other remotely on secondhand ideas. When the Machine begins to fail, they lack the will to notice and the knowledge to repair it. Kuno, who has physically climbed to the surface, is the only truly vital human left. Written in 1909 as a rebuttal to H.G. Wells's techno-utopianism, this story predicts the internet, cognitive atrophy, and the Google effect with extraordinary precision — 115 years before its time. Hugo and Nebula Award precursor; SFWA Hall of Fame (1973).

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH, was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy and also the attitudes towards gender and homosexuality in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his …