Since its publication in 1909, E. M. Forster's longest novella, "The Machine Stops," has received brief and sometimes begrudging critical attention, though a few critics have rightly recognized it as a masterpiece of science fiction…. For the imaginative predictions Forster made sixty-five years ago have proven to be frighteningly prophetic, and the story is one of the first of a distinguished family of serious twentieth-century anti-utopian novels. Written long before Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984, "The Machine Stops" remains in many ways their superior in its tight compression, its impassioned warnings against the growing nightmare of technological dehumanization, and its brilliant satirical sting…. No one … has tried to explain why and how this neglected novella differs from his other works. Nor has another of Forster's comments on "The Machine Stops" been adequately explored. Referring to his novella in The Collected Tales as a "counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells," Forster has frankly acknowledged its connection, by way of satirical protest, to The Time Machine. But his comment, curiously enough, reveals a deeper significance in its conspicuous omission of a far more pervasive influence on "The Machine Stops" from a vastly older literary source. For in rejecting one type of utopia, Forster instinctively turned to another utopia—the "Myth of the Cave" section of Plato's Republic—to fashion both the form and content of his own subterranean, planetwide cave that constitutes the hellish civilization in which dwell the intellectually self-deceived, emotionally sterile inhabitants of his story before the machine stops. (p. 172)
Forster's authorial narrator begins in the same compelling way as he immediately implicates his readers into his fictive universe. "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee."… The crucial word here, and of course with every utopia, is "imagine"; but Forster's added qualification—"if you can"—suggests a greater skepticism in his confidence that twentieth-century readers still retain this precious gift…. [The] allegorical nature of the "Myth of the Cave" has a decisive impact upon the schematic outlines of Forster's novella. But whereas the abstract, undeveloped cave in Plato's allegory vaguely extends "a long way underground," in Forster's fantasy the cave becomes more than merely an isolated image or a mechanical symbol (though it is a symbol of the mechanical). It becomes, in short, a complex and perfectly realized setting for an entire underground universe, in which the basic living unit, expressed by the ironic simile of the "cell of a bee," remains irreconcilably antithetical to the organic, natural, fecundating imagery evoked by the delicate insect that feeds on the nectar of flowers. (p. 173)
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