• About
  • Listening
    • Baroque
    • Bluegrass and Country
    • Classical Fusion
    • Classical Period
    • Early Music
    • Film soundtracks
    • Folk Music
    • Jazz
    • Modern Classical
    • Modern Pop Fusion
    • Musicals
    • Romantic Classical
    • Spoken word
    • World Music
  • Reading
    • Fiction
      • Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
      • Classic writers and their works
      • Contemporary Fiction
      • Crime and Detective Fiction
      • Fictionalised Biography
      • Historical Fiction
      • Horror
      • Lighter-hearted reads
      • Literary Fiction
      • Plays and Poetry
      • Romance
      • SF
      • Short stories
      • Western
      • Whimsy and Fantastical
    • Non-Fiction
      • Arts
      • Biography and Autobiography
      • Ethics, reflection, a meditative space
      • Food and Drink
      • Geography and Travel
      • Health and wellbeing
      • History and Social History
      • Philosophy of Mind
      • Science and nature
      • Society; Politics; Economics
  • Reading the 20th Century
  • Watching
    • Documentary
    • Film
    • Staged Production
    • TV
  • Shouting From The Soapbox
    • Arts Soapbox
    • Chitchat
    • Philosophical Soapbox
    • Science and Health Soapbox
  • Interviews / Q + A
  • Indexes
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
    • Sound Index
      • Composers Index
      • Performers Index
    • Filmed Index

Lady Fancifull

~ adventures in a mainly literary obsession

Lady Fancifull

Tag Archives: E.M.Forster

E.M.Forster – The Machine Stops

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Classic writers and their works, Fiction, Reading, SF, Short stories

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

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

Considering the time of writing, astonishingly and horribly prophetic

the-machine-stopsE.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

smartphone-obsession

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.

self-service-machines

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

more-smartphones

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 breathe-m-forster

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

Advertisement

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Damon Galgut – Arctic Summer

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Fictionalised Biography, Literary Fiction, Reading

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

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

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

Arctic SummerI 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

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 Galgutarise 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

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Page Indexes

  • About
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
  • Sound Index
    • Composers Index
    • Performers Index
  • Filmed Index

Genres

Archives

January 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Mar    

Posts Getting Perused

  • William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
    William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
  • Mick Herron - Dead Lions
    Mick Herron - Dead Lions
  • Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
    Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
  • David Bez - Salad Love
    David Bez - Salad Love
  • Christiane Ritter - A Woman In The Polar Night
    Christiane Ritter - A Woman In The Polar Night
  • Banished - TV Drama
    Banished - TV Drama
  • Jean-Claude Ellena - Diary of a Nose: A Year In The Life of a Parfumeur
    Jean-Claude Ellena - Diary of a Nose: A Year In The Life of a Parfumeur
  • About
    About

Recent Posts

  • Bart Van Es – The Cut Out Girl
  • Joan Baez – Vol 1
  • J.S.Bach – Goldberg Variations – Zhu Xiao-Mei
  • Zhu Xiao-Mei – The Secret Piano
  • Jane Harper – The Lost Man

NetGalley Badges

Fancifull Stats

  • 162,790 hits
Follow Lady Fancifull on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow on Bloglovin

Tags

1930s setting Adult Faerie Tale Andrew Greig Arvo Pärt Autobiography baroque Beryl Bainbridge Biography Biography as Fiction Bits and Bobs Bits and Pieces Book Review Books about Books Cats Children's Book Review Classical music Classical music review Classic Crime Fiction Colm Toibin Cookery Book Crime Fiction David Mitchell Dystopia Espionage Ethics Fantasy Fiction Feminism Film review First World War Folk Music Food Industry France Gay and Lesbian Literature Ghost story Golden-Age Crime Fiction Graham Greene Health and wellbeing Historical Fiction History Humour Humour and Wit Ireland Irish writer Irvin D. Yalom Janice Galloway Japan Literary Fiction Literary pastiche Lynn Shepherd Marcus Sedgwick Meditation Mick Herron Minimalism Music review Myths and Legends Neil Gaiman Ngaio Marsh Novels about America Other Stuff Patrick Flanery Patrick Hamilton Perfumery Philip Glass Philosophy Police Procedural Post-Apocalypse Psychiatry Psychological Thriller Psychology Psychotherapy Publication Day Reading Rebecca Mascull Reflection Robert Harris Rose Tremain Russian Revolution sacred music Sadie Jones Sci-Fi Science and nature Scottish writer Second World War SF Shakespeare Short stories Simon Mawer Soapbox Spy thriller Susan Hill Tana French The Cold War The Natural World TV Drama Victorian set fiction Whimsy and Fantasy Fiction William Boyd World music review Writing Young Adult Fiction

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Join 771 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.

    %d bloggers like this: