The Machine Stops

By E. M. Forster

Categories: Literature & Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy

E. M. Forster's story, first published in 1909, imagines a future in which humanity lives underground in identical rooms, each person's needs supplied by a vast, all-powerful Machine. People rarely meet face to face and communicate instead through screens. Vashti, content with this life, is unsettled when her son Kuno asks to see her in person and confesses that he has visited the surface without permission. Gradually the Machine begins to falter.

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