The Machine Stops,” a 1909 short story by E. M. Forster, uncannily imagines our technology-dependent world—and what might happen when the tech breaks down.
In 1909, Edward Morgan Forster published a story, “The Machine Stops,” which now seems astonishingly prescient. One does not normally associate E. M. Forster with science fiction: he is considered more a chronicler of the etiolated emotional life of the English upper-middle classes of the Edwardian era. But his one foray into science fiction seemed to foreshadow exactly the kind of scenes that followed last month’s brief disruption to 3 million computers worldwide by the intrusion of a faulty new update into Microsoft programs.
