Forster's novella The Machine Stops established the essential outlines of the dystopian parable. It is set, of course, in the future, at a time when men have abandoned the surface of the earth to live in massive underground cities resembling air-conditioned anthills. Here, in a completely controlled and artificial environment, they are removed from all contact with Nature…. (p. 90)
In this story … Forster has anticipated most, if not quite all, of the themes of subsequent dystopian novels: the horrors of a society "perfected" by technology; the totalitarian face of a regime deifying "reason" in all its regulations; the denial of the body, the passions and the instincts, and the consequent automatization of man; and the lone rebel's attempt to escape from his mega-civilization and return to Nature. As in the classic dystopias, the rebel fails, crushed beneath the juggernaut of the Machine; but here the Machine fails too. One day the Machine stops. And in a few elegiac pages, Forster movingly chronicles the death of a world. (p. 91)
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