The machine stands still

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The machine is idle ( English : The Machine Stops ) is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by EM Forster . First published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), it was reprinted in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. Voted one of the best novels in 1965, it was included in the popular anthology Modern Short Stories . In 1973 she was inducted into The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two .

The story, which takes place in a world in which humanity lives underground and relies on a gigantic machine to fulfill its needs, predicts new technologies such as the Internet and instant messengers .

Summary

Most people are no longer able to live on the surface of the earth. Each individual lives underground in isolation in a standardized room that satisfies all physical and spiritual needs through the omnipotent, global machine. Travel is allowed, but unpopular and rarely necessary. Is communicated through an instant messaging video conference services, conduct their activities only on the people: the exchange (sharing) of ideas and what as knowledge (knowledge) applies.

The two protagonists , Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite ends of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most people's, consists of endlessly developing and discussing second-hand ideas. Kuno, on the other hand, is a rebel and sensory. He persuades the reluctant Vashti to undertake the journey to his room associated with unwelcome personal interaction. There he tells her about his disillusionment with the mechanized, germ-free world.

He confesses to an unauthorized excursion to the surface where he saw other people living outside the machine's influence. The machine that appears in the shape of worms, however, catches him again and threatens him with "homelessness", the exclusion from the subterranean environment, which is considered death. However, he finds hope in the fact that while fighting the worms he will meet another person who is independent of the machine:

"[...] because she came to my help when I called - because she, too, was entangled by the worms, and, luckier than I, was killed by one of them piercing her throat."

"[...] because she, who was luckier than me, was killed when one of the worms pierced her neck."

Vashti dismisses her son's concerns as dangerous madness and returns to her part of the world.

As time goes by and Vashti lives the routine of her life, two important developments occur. The breathing masks that allow visits to the outside world are no longer provided. Most welcome this because they are skeptical and fearful of firsthand experiences and those who seek those experiences.

"Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution."

"Instead, work out what I think, what Enicharmon thought, what Urizen thought, what Gutch thought, what HoYong thought, what ChiBoSing thought, what Lafcadio Hearn thought, what Carlyle thought, what Mirabeau said about the French Revolution ."

Second, the machine assumes a divine status and is worshiped. People forget that the machine is man-made and treat it as a mythical entity whose needs supersede their own. Anyone who denies the divinity of the machine is considered "non-machine" and is threatened with homelessness. The correction apparatus that maintains the machine fails, but concern about it is dismissed as the machine is considered omnipotent.

Kuno is moved to a room near Vashti and believes the machine is starting to fail. He tells her cryptically: “Not much longer, and the MACHINE will stand still.” Vashti lives on, but defects become noticeable. At first people accept decay as a quirk of the machine to which they are now completely submissive and subservient, but the deterioration continues as the knowledge of how to repair the machine has been lost.

In the end, the machine collapses apocalyptically and takes civilization with it. Kuno arrives in Vashti's ruined space, and before they pass they realize that human connection with real life is what truly matters. Only the remaining surface people can resurrect humanity and prevent a repetition of the machine's error.

Motifs

In the preface to the Collected Short Stories (1947) Forster wrote that this story was a reaction to HG Wells ' The Time Machine . Wells had drawn the childlike Eloi like Greek gods who indulged in leisure while the Morlocks toiled underground to make this idyllic life possible. In contrast to Wells' political comment, Forster presents technology itself as the ultimate controlling authority.

Adaptations

  • A television play by Philip Saville was shown on October 6, 1966 as part of the British SF anthology Out of the Unknown .
  • Playwright Eric Coble's 2004 stage adaptation aired on November 16, 2007 on WCPN 90.3 FM in Cleveland , Ohio.
  • BBC Radio 4 broadcast Gregory Normintons version in 2001 as a radio play.
  • The NDR produced a radio play adaptation by Felix Kubin , which was first broadcast on May 23, 2018 on NDR Kultur .
  • TMS: The Machine Stops is a comic book by Michael Lent with pictures by Marc Rene, published by Alterna Comics in February 2014.
  • A play by Neil Duffield was performed at the York Theater Royal from May to June 2016 and toured England in 2017 with a soundtrack composed by John Foxx .
  • Mad magazine , October – November 1952 issue, contained Blobs, a seven-page story drawn by Wallace Wood in which two residents of 1,000,000 AD tell the story of mankind and its evolution into blobs entirely dependent on the machine , to discuss. The sudden collapse of the machine and the consequences perfectly reflect the story from 1909.

expenditure

  • Edward Morgan Forster: The Machine stops , WikiSource, English.
  • Edward Morgan Forster: The machine fails. Translation by Hermen von Kleeborn, Amandus Edition, Vienna 1947, DNB 573108730 .
    • New translation by Heinz Koblischke: The machine stops in a duel in the 25th century: Stories of happy worlds and times to come - Classic science fiction stories , Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-360-00083-8 .
    • new translation by Philipp Schmoetten: Die Maschine , Letter Print, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-903117-03-7 .
    • new translation by Gregor Runge: The machine stands still. With a blurb by Jaron Lanier . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-455-40571-2 .

Derivative works

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: The Machine Stops  - Quotes
Wikisource: The Machine Stops  - Sources and full texts (English)
Commons : LibriVox - The Machine Stops  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SH Burton (Ed.): Modern Short Stories. In: Longman Heritage of Literature series. 6th edition. Longman Group Ltd, Great Britain 1970.
  2. ↑ Chapter The Mending Apparatus , penultimate paragraph
  3. ↑ Chapter The Homeless , end of the second paragraph
  4. ↑ WCPN Program Highlights . Archived from the original on November 3, 2012. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved November 12, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ideastream.org
  5. ↑ BBC Radio 4 FM: The Machine Stops , April 24, 2001.
  6. ^ NDR Kultur: radio play The machine stands still , May 29, 2018.
  7. ^ The Machine Stops (mini-series) .
  8. ↑ Chris Long: The Machine Stops: Did EM Forster predict the internet age? BBC, May 18, 2016.
  9. ↑ Pilot-Theatre.com: The Machine Stops. Retrieved January 23, 2017 .
  10. ^ "The Nostrand Zone" by Bhob Stewart . Retrieved September 24, 2015.
  11. ↑ MAD MAGAZINE NEVER STOPS- 1952 MAD version of MACHINE STOPS (video) . Retrieved September 24, 2015.
  12. ↑ David Hajdu: The Ten-Cent Plague. The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America . Macmillan, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4299-3705-4 , pp. 199 ( books.google.de ).