E.M.Forster – The Machine Stops

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Book Review, E.M.Forster, SF, Short Story, The Machine Stops

Considering the time of writing, astonishingly and horribly prophetic

E.M.Forster wrote this ‘Science Fiction story’ in 1909. Pre-computer, pre-world wide web, pre-smart talking to itself technology.

Just over 100 years later this seems not like science fiction at all, more, something which might be a mere handful of years away, and in many ways, already here.

Set sometime in the future (at the time of writing) human beings have gratefully done away with all the challenging, messy stuff of having to communicate with each other, and skilfully negotiate co-operation with another face to face human being, in real time and place.

Instead, each lives softly cocooned like a babe inside a personal pod, where all wants are regulated by sentient technology. The technology ‘The Machine’ was once created and conceived of by humans, but now it does things so much more efficiently than any one human can do. All needs, be they of ambient temperature, health and well being, education, entertainment, furniture, are seamlessly provided by the machine, and the human being in its pod never has to rub up against the messy flesh of another. Communication happens by seeing (and hearing) each other on some kind of screen. You in your small pod, me in mine

Everything that can be controlled, is, and everything that can’t, in the material world, is regarded as unpleasant and dangerous.

Living happens in the personal pod, deep below the earth, where the air supply is regulated, and purified. The surface of the earth is deemed dangerous, the air not fit to breathe. The Machine has told us so, so it must be true.

Vashti, the central character is happy in her pod. Her son is a difficult and challenging embarrassment to her and their ‘meetings’ on screen do not go well. He also has disturbing things to say about The Machine, and appears to harbour dangerously subversive ideas about a better, earlier time, when people communicated directly with each other. And then………well, the title of the story shows where this will lead.

Twenty-first century readers can’t help but look around at a world where we are all clutching our little screens,facetwitting, Instachatting, occupying the same space as each other in cafes, on buses, colliding on the street, but rarely connecting with each other, in real. Terminals in shops instruct us that we have placed an unrecognised item in the bagging area. Doctor’s surgeries require us to register our arrival on a screen, whilst the receptionist communicates only with her own terminal. And children, so we are told, no longer realise that potatoes grow in the earth, milk comes from cows, and, from early years are plonked in front of screens with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawking sounds, so their harassed parents can get on with the important stuff of staring at their own little screens, busy with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawks of their own

Whilst I certainly prefer Forster’s more ‘traditional’, literary novels of relationship this is a horribly possible vision, and it is tempting to categorise it as contemporary fiction, not Sci-Fi at all

A short piece, it punches the gut and leaves the reader gasping for breath

And, the inevitable link to my virtual bloggy buddy FictionFan, who once again brought something to my attention I would otherwise not have known about. You can read her review here. We have never met, in real, and I realise the whole wonderful book blogging community is a ‘virtual’ like Forster is warning us about. There are many good things about our virtual connections, but I sincerely hope to live out my days on the surface of this planet, not beneath it (that can come later!) and welcome the real faces of real people as we meet each other, bump against each other, and even talk, face to face, in real time and space

A version a little more alarming than the better known one by Simon and Garfunkel

The Machine Stops Amazon UK
The Machine Stops Amazon USA

Damon Galgut – Arctic Summer

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Arctic Summer, Book Review, Damon Galgut, E.M.Forster

E.M. Forster and the writing of A Passage To India

I have struggled, to some extent, with Damon Galgut’s ‘biographical novel’ about E.M. Forster, Arctic Summer, which uses the title of an ‘incomplete’ novel Forster wrote, which was unpublished in his lifetime.

The subject matter of the book is two-fold, taking as it does not a cradle-to-grave biographical approach, but an examination of the process of writing itself, particularly the writing of A Passage To India, and also, Forster’s struggle with the straitjackets of his class, at a particular time in history and in geography (the time of Empire) and of a sexuality which was not only illegal, but, for a large part of his life, shameful to Forster, whether expressed or not.

My struggle with this book, much as I admire Galgut’s writing, is that he is himself a writer with a tendency to conceal as much as he reveals. He is a writer of spare and beautiful prose, but the reader is deliberately not drawn in. There is a reserve in his writing. This does of course perfectly fit his subject in this book. Forster was also a man of reserve, both through the entirely stiff upper lip repressed attitudes of the times, rendered even more obvious in Forster because he did have so much to hide, and in many ways was so very unlike the hearty, anti-intellectual Empire builders of the time, who did not mingle socially with, and indeed despised, ‘the natives’.

This was a vigorous, outdoor world, full of sports and guns. If you didn’t join the club or play polo or shoot tigers or subdue barbarous tribes on the borders, you were immediately an unsound quantity, the more so if,…you lived in your mind a great deal and wrote books. Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?

So, Galgut, a writer of some reserve, and a tendency to a kind of cool unfervent mysticism – most potently seen in In A Strange Room – writes about Forster, who seems similarly reserved. Both men are/were clearly both deeply thinking and deeply feeling, but the ‘Only Connect’ central to, I believe, both writers, is not easy, in either of them. Reserved writing about a Reserved writer in the end left me wanting more, as the book wore on.

Now in an extended clarity, he saw the way forward. He had wanted the story to open out, and suddenly it had, in the most Indian of ways, into wider questions about the universe

It’s strengths for me were in the earlier part of the book, where the absolute awfulness of living at a time and in a place where sexual orientation was so rigidly and restrictedly defined and culturally and legally controlled, are beautifully expressed. Galgut does not use polemic, or bang drums, or preach to a possibly largely converted audience, but, almost dispassionately, lays out what is/was, and lets the effect of that resonate for the reader. His recounting of the sense of shame and self loathing which so many ‘minories’ inhabited, was deeply distressing.

E.M.Forster painted by Dora Carrington, Wiki Commons

Forster’s discomfort with the prevailing racist, classist attitudes of his peers, AND his sense of shame and self-loathing at the times he became aware of those self-same attitudes within him, also formed a telling part of the story.

It is perhaps inevitable that ‘Forster the man’ and the difficulties and challenges which arise through being part of one culture, time and place, are more immediately resonant to a reader who is not a novelist than the interesting (but, for me, more cerebrally experienced) passages about writing itself, and particularly the gestation and difficulties of writing A Passage To India, which at times for me became a little dry. I very much admire Forster’s writing, but was less interested, in this case, in the process of that writing, whereas the man within the larger world, within his time, was absolutely absorbing

He had cut himself open and showed the innermost part; it had been rash and unconsidered and regrettable. Now he had to close himself up again, to seal the carapace, and he began to do what was necessary. It was part of a willed cheerfulness he had learned back in his childhood already, as protection against disappointment. The only defence against raw, naked feeling was reason. Understanding made sadness easier to bear

Arctic Summer Amazon UK
Arctic Summer Amazon USA