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...