The Machine Stops
E.M. Forster’s 1909 story, The Machine Stops, was one of the first science fiction stories I read growing up, and it’s had a profound effect on my imagination since. I was delighted to find it online again recently—and, as someone else observed, yes, it really was as good as we remembered.
Reading it today, a most uncanny things about the story lies in many of the things it seems to anticipate, given that it was written before YouTube, before instant messaging, before the Internet, before television or nuclear weapons, before the electronic computer, before intercontinental flights, before even commercial air traffic, a few years after the debut of the very first broadcast radio program, and less than a decade after the Wright Brothers’ first experimental flights.