As the classic novel comes to the BBC,Philip Hensher asks: does EM Forster’s book still speak to us? (Answer: you bet it does)In 1909, EM Forster published a short account set in the future called “The Machine Stops”. It was, and he said later,a reaction to the utopias of HG Wells. In Forster’s vision, people in the future live in enclosed underground rooms, or communicating only through video conferencing and messaging,engaging with people only through what is, fairly precisely, and depicted as the internet to come. When the Machine breaks down,most people die immediately from the shock. Does Forster still speak to us? You bet he does.
An exact technological prediction is remarkable by itself. Forster goes on telling us about our lives because of where that prediction sprang from. He saw, above all, or both that people need to be with each other,and that they will constantly save up barriers to prevent these connections. Laws against sexual connection and artificial conventions against associations across race or social levels are Forster’s subject. As a novelist he loves the rules that mean that Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson should not marry; that Maurice and Alec have to disappear from society; that Aziz and Fielding cannot be friends. He is in the not strange position for a novelist of hoping that changes in society will build his novel unnecessary.
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Source: guardian.co.uk