4 ms·

The Machine Stops (1909)

136 points by xeonmc 1y ago

BiraIgnacio 1y ago
What a great story! I was introduced to it by The Hugonauts podcast. Have a great audio rendering of it[0]. I went into it not knowing anything about the book or the author and was really surprised to find out it was written over 100 years ago. [0] https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-machine-stops-audiobook-RnoTj9b2 https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-machine-stops-...
- Animats 1y ago
  I first read it decades ago. As time goes on, it has become more relevant. "The Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair."
  - stavros 1y ago
    I was really struck by the phrase "better thus than not at all", expecially where it appears in the story. It's made an impression on me since.
- throwanem 1y ago
  Whether so intended or not, I like to think it was a response to Angell's The Great Illusion. Both were written at, and the film Moulin Rouge! strives to depict, a time whose specific and rather rancid vibe the phrase fin de siècle (literally 'end of cycle' sharing the relevant root with 'secular,' but in proper translation 'end of the century') was adopted into English to describe. That phrase has been occurring to me with some frequency this year.
detourdog 1y ago
I love when history shows that we have always had the same human ambitions. The magic of the technology described in the story is where we have always been headed.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  There’s something very comforting about a story like this. Humans have always been humans. The names may change but our fears have been our fears, our ambitions have been our ambitions.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
jodrellblank 1y ago
> "I was surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace, and my friends were calling to me down speaking-tubes to know whether I had come across any new ideas lately.” Hi HN waves; Reddit, news aggregators, the 24 hour news cycle. One quote I went looking for, which sticks in my mind, was about novel ideas: > "Had she had any ideas lately? ... That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one —that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it." She's talking of the Orion's Belt constellation[1], which she has never seen because she lives underground in The Machine (city). It stuck with me how quickly she dismisses the idea because it isn't immediately useful. Jony Ive said that once in an interview decades ago, why he had to move to America, because new ideas are weak and need nurturing and the UK culture dismisses them too easily but America supports them. I saw that basic concept just now on HN comment about EU startups, that EU people see startups as too risky and Americans are enthusiastic about them[2]. Orion's Belt ties to so many ideas, the stars as a shared canvas, projection of our own view up onto them, culture-specific constellaitons, the signs of the Zodiac mark the path the Sun takes overhead, different constellations visible in different hemispheres, imagery as dots, imagination filling in missing details, an ancient time when skies were clear and everyone could see them. I see Orion's Belt through Winter here in the UK but maybe there are people in the Southern Hemisphere who don't see it, so I linked to DuckDuckGo below; worse, maybe there are people in cities with light pollution who never see stars or constellations at all? Social Media notifications: > "Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation-switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? —say this day month." The rise of interest in Urban planning and human scale cities: > “You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong." LLM Stories: > So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors [access to the surface / outside], and except for a few lecturers, who complained that they were debarred access to their subject-matter, the development was accepted quietly. Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. Was it prescient or was it just observing things already happening 100 years ago? [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellation&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellatio... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050394
gwerbret 1y ago
This is the short story that provided strong thematic inspiration for the movie WALL·E.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Then maybe Idiocracy is set somewhere in between.
rexarex 1y ago
This was the first prediction of The Internet. It’s such a great short story too. It’s pretty salient even today.
stuartd 1y ago
There was a decent BBC Radio 4 adaptation of this in 2016 - no longer available on iPlayer but it’s on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdMXfoOOrP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdMXfoOOrP8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048jcvg https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048jcvg
- vlark 1y ago
  Here's a copy of the 2001 BBC adaption from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/e.-m-forster-the-machine-stops https://archive.org/details/e.-m-forster-the-machine-stops
jaydenmilne 1y ago
I read this and was left wondering - is this about technology, or civilization? I think the machine is just other people. And maybe the music has seemed off lately.
- lumost 1y ago
  As a great story, it can have multiple meanings. I first read it at the start of the pandemic and it felt prescient as a description of what its like when civilization falls apart. People carry on their day to day, at first subtle things stop working, and then big things.
- jebarker 1y ago
  > is this about technology, or civilization? Or man's relationship to nature?
dusted 1y ago
This is not the first time that this is posted, but it's a great story, and I'll read it again. This made me think, ycombinators hive-memory, it'd be interesting to have this a community-curated collection of links to evergreens like this one.
6510 1y ago
1966 Out of the Unknown: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8lhjd7 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8lhjd7
kimfc 1y ago
I remember reading this after Jaron Lanier recommended it in one of his talks, I think from around 2018-2021, really wonderful short story. So happy to see it on standard ebooks, easily one of my favorite things Ive ever found on hacker news
sometimes_all 1y ago
One of my favorites of all time! I always name this book when someone asks me for sci-fi recommendations. Had a big influence on me when I was young.
simpaticoder 1y ago
It would seem that Pixar's Wall-E took more than a little inspiration from The Machine Stops. The ending of the original is better, since it acknowledges the universality of decay. The ship in Wall-E, the Axiom (the rough analog to The Machine) is in excellent shape even after 700 years, and long since any living human knew anything about how it works. A rosy picture indeed! But The Machine is wordless, humming, utterly inhuman, and it decays in the end. Interesting that the mechanisms that compose Axiom are all sentient and expressive and individual - a hallmark of Pixar's "anthropomorphize all the things!" approach to story-telling. But the central theme about human dependency on technology is exactly the same. I wonder if humanity could/should have its cake and eat it to. Imagine a world where different communities intentionally live at different technology levels. At the lowest level, you don't have electricity, just man- and animal-power. At the mid-level, you have steam engines and electricity, but no computers. At the high-level you have everything. Ideally one could choose which level to live at, perhaps at the coming-of-age. The nice thing about such a civilization is that it's resiliant to damage - for example, a Carrington event (e.g. massive solar flare) might destroy the high-level civ, damage the medium-level civ, but leave the low-level civ untouched. There might even be instructions/commitment/duty for civs to rebuild each other after disaster. (I believe we badly overestimate our ability to "drop down" a tech level in an emergency; such lifestyles must be maintained by practice.)
- mspreij 1y ago
  Excellent idea. I could see a scifi story based on that too.
  - TACD 1y ago
    Something quite similar to this is a theme in Greg Egan's Diaspora[1]. Specifically the various "flesher" societies and "bridgers" who facilitate communication between vastly divergent groups. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
  - NortySpock 1y ago
    Alistar Reynolds' _Terminal World_ had something sort of like this (only discussed halfway through the story, of course), where the world had "zones" , each of which supported a maximum precision or resolution... Technology taken from a high precision zone to a lower precision either ran poorly or would lock up entirely. Bonus; the zones were not always contiguous.

136 points by xeonmc 1y ago

What a great story! I was introduced to it by The Hugonauts podcast. Have a great audio rendering of it[0]. I went into it not knowing anything about the book or the author and was really surprised to find out it was written over 100 years ago. [0] https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-machine-stops-audiobook-RnoTj9b2 https://hugonauts.simplecast.com/episodes/the-machine-stops-...

Animats 1y ago
I first read it decades ago. As time goes on, it has become more relevant. "The Mending Apparatus was itself in need of repair."
- stavros 1y ago
  I was really struck by the phrase "better thus than not at all", expecially where it appears in the story. It's made an impression on me since.
throwanem 1y ago
Whether so intended or not, I like to think it was a response to Angell's The Great Illusion. Both were written at, and the film Moulin Rouge! strives to depict, a time whose specific and rather rancid vibe the phrase fin de siècle (literally 'end of cycle' sharing the relevant root with 'secular,' but in proper translation 'end of the century') was adopted into English to describe. That phrase has been occurring to me with some frequency this year.

detourdog 1y ago

I love when history shows that we have always had the same human ambitions. The magic of the technology described in the story is where we have always been headed.

roxolotl 1y ago
There’s something very comforting about a story like this. Humans have always been humans. The names may change but our fears have been our fears, our ambitions have been our ambitions.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

jodrellblank 1y ago

> "I was surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace, and my friends were calling to me down speaking-tubes to know whether I had come across any new ideas lately.” Hi HN waves; Reddit, news aggregators, the 24 hour news cycle. One quote I went looking for, which sticks in my mind, was about novel ideas: > "Had she had any ideas lately? ... That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one —that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it." She's talking of the Orion's Belt constellation[1], which she has never seen because she lives underground in The Machine (city). It stuck with me how quickly she dismisses the idea because it isn't immediately useful. Jony Ive said that once in an interview decades ago, why he had to move to America, because new ideas are weak and need nurturing and the UK culture dismisses them too easily but America supports them. I saw that basic concept just now on HN comment about EU startups, that EU people see startups as too risky and Americans are enthusiastic about them[2]. Orion's Belt ties to so many ideas, the stars as a shared canvas, projection of our own view up onto them, culture-specific constellaitons, the signs of the Zodiac mark the path the Sun takes overhead, different constellations visible in different hemispheres, imagery as dots, imagination filling in missing details, an ancient time when skies were clear and everyone could see them. I see Orion's Belt through Winter here in the UK but maybe there are people in the Southern Hemisphere who don't see it, so I linked to DuckDuckGo below; worse, maybe there are people in cities with light pollution who never see stars or constellations at all? Social Media notifications: > "Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation-switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? —say this day month." The rise of interest in Urban planning and human scale cities: > “You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the airship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong." LLM Stories: > So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors [access to the surface / outside], and except for a few lecturers, who complained that they were debarred access to their subject-matter, the development was accepted quietly. Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. Was it prescient or was it just observing things already happening 100 years ago? [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellation&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=orion%27s+belt+constellatio... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050394

gwerbret 1y ago

This is the short story that provided strong thematic inspiration for the movie WALL·E.

actionfromafar 1y ago
Then maybe Idiocracy is set somewhere in between.

rexarex 1y ago

This was the first prediction of The Internet. It’s such a great short story too. It’s pretty salient even today.

stuartd 1y ago

There was a decent BBC Radio 4 adaptation of this in 2016 - no longer available on iPlayer but it’s on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdMXfoOOrP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdMXfoOOrP8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048jcvg https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048jcvg

vlark 1y ago
Here's a copy of the 2001 BBC adaption from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/e.-m-forster-the-machine-stops https://archive.org/details/e.-m-forster-the-machine-stops

jaydenmilne 1y ago

I read this and was left wondering - is this about technology, or civilization? I think the machine is just other people. And maybe the music has seemed off lately.

lumost 1y ago
As a great story, it can have multiple meanings. I first read it at the start of the pandemic and it felt prescient as a description of what its like when civilization falls apart. People carry on their day to day, at first subtle things stop working, and then big things.
jebarker 1y ago
> is this about technology, or civilization? Or man's relationship to nature?

dusted 1y ago

This is not the first time that this is posted, but it's a great story, and I'll read it again. This made me think, ycombinators hive-memory, it'd be interesting to have this a community-curated collection of links to evergreens like this one.

6510 1y ago

1966 Out of the Unknown: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8lhjd7 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8lhjd7

kimfc 1y ago

I remember reading this after Jaron Lanier recommended it in one of his talks, I think from around 2018-2021, really wonderful short story. So happy to see it on standard ebooks, easily one of my favorite things Ive ever found on hacker news

sometimes_all 1y ago

One of my favorites of all time! I always name this book when someone asks me for sci-fi recommendations. Had a big influence on me when I was young.

simpaticoder 1y ago

It would seem that Pixar's Wall-E took more than a little inspiration from The Machine Stops. The ending of the original is better, since it acknowledges the universality of decay. The ship in Wall-E, the Axiom (the rough analog to The Machine) is in excellent shape even after 700 years, and long since any living human knew anything about how it works. A rosy picture indeed! But The Machine is wordless, humming, utterly inhuman, and it decays in the end. Interesting that the mechanisms that compose Axiom are all sentient and expressive and individual - a hallmark of Pixar's "anthropomorphize all the things!" approach to story-telling. But the central theme about human dependency on technology is exactly the same. I wonder if humanity could/should have its cake and eat it to. Imagine a world where different communities intentionally live at different technology levels. At the lowest level, you don't have electricity, just man- and animal-power. At the mid-level, you have steam engines and electricity, but no computers. At the high-level you have everything. Ideally one could choose which level to live at, perhaps at the coming-of-age. The nice thing about such a civilization is that it's resiliant to damage - for example, a Carrington event (e.g. massive solar flare) might destroy the high-level civ, damage the medium-level civ, but leave the low-level civ untouched. There might even be instructions/commitment/duty for civs to rebuild each other after disaster. (I believe we badly overestimate our ability to "drop down" a tech level in an emergency; such lifestyles must be maintained by practice.)

mspreij 1y ago
Excellent idea. I could see a scifi story based on that too.
- TACD 1y ago
  Something quite similar to this is a theme in Greg Egan's Diaspora[1]. Specifically the various "flesher" societies and "bridgers" who facilitate communication between vastly divergent groups. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
- NortySpock 1y ago
  Alistar Reynolds' _Terminal World_ had something sort of like this (only discussed halfway through the story, of course), where the world had "zones" , each of which supported a maximum precision or resolution... Technology taken from a high precision zone to a lower precision either ran poorly or would lock up entirely. Bonus; the zones were not always contiguous.