I got much of my description wrong, but enough to hit key buttons for a reader. I recommend you read the story first. There's a lot in there that's more important than this week's news.
To show how dim I am, I even looked at the table of contents for all of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame books. (I have had them, but given multiple copies away.) I saw the title "The Machine Stops," but it didn't click. I think even though I had already seen the title "The Roads Must Roll," I saw Forster's title and thought it must be that story. Or the one with the spindizzies.
It was written in 1909. I was way off, and Forster's prescience is even more amazing. I had forgotten the second half of the story. But the remembrance came to me when considering our internet-driven, and now even device-driven world in which actual human contact is considered less and less necessary. Forster seems to think such a people would be easy to control, if those who wanted power took their time.
3 comments:
People can be obstinate and confusing. So much easier to isolate them to make them easier to plug in to the machine--or to set aside as useless.
I recognized it immediately from your description, but somebody else had already informed you what it was. I went and read it again, 35 years after my first reading. It's really astonishing to see how much he anticipated.
The irony of us communicating about this story over the internet is not lost on me.
@ gongtao - heh. It was lost on me until you pointed it out. I can be remarkably obtuse at times.
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