Skip to main content
12 events
when toggle format what by license comment
Jan 16, 2021 at 19:51 comment added andrewtinka Other comments have litigated this, but I'll note that the reason I didn't accept this answer is that in "The Machine Stops", society has neither fragmented nor taken on a historical form.
Jan 11, 2021 at 17:22 comment added DavidW @indigochild Pray, then explain what "structures similar to historical societies" there are?
Jan 11, 2021 at 17:08 comment added indigochild @DavidW I appreciate your feedback, but I disagree with each of your conclusions. I have already addressed most of them in the comments.
Jan 11, 2021 at 14:15 comment added DavidW (1) There was no apocalyptic event, to the extent that there was even something that could be construed as an apocalypse; (2) survivors did not have to gather and re-form a society, it just kept running, and did not regress to a historical societal form; (3) there is no AI and (3a) the computer does not drive the plot.
Jan 11, 2021 at 12:49 comment added Graham @NickMatteo They still can - but they've been taught (by/through the Machine) that they can't. That's a key plot point. Whilst there may have been valid reasons for going underground in the first place, those reasons no longer apply. The protagonist's son is capable of dealing with this re-evaluation, but the protagonist (fatally) is not.
Jan 10, 2021 at 20:34 comment added indigochild @Joshua. I disagree about human reasoning. We don't see humans reasoning and solving problems, except to decide who is exiled. To the contrary, our (unreliable) accounts suggest that the Machine solves all of these problems for them. Part of the difficulty is that Forster is writing a time before digital electronic computation. The mechanical language he uses is a limitation, but it (in my mind) clearly evokes our modern conception of artificial intelligence.
Jan 10, 2021 at 20:20 comment added Joshua I read The Machine Stops. The Machine didn't seem to have any more intelligence than an adding machine. It's computational power was enormous but it's complexity seemed to be linear without so much as simple feedback loops. Reasoning was being carried out by humans working on the problems that were.
Jan 10, 2021 at 7:17 comment added indigochild @NickMatteo Those all sound like perfectly valid examples to me. And there are many such examples extant in the apocalyptic fiction genre.
Jan 10, 2021 at 6:07 comment added Nick Matteo Right, but it's not post apocalyptic in that there wasn't an apocalypse. We just overfished the oceans, overfarmed the land, overindustrialized, and the outside gradually became less hospitable. I don't think the environment is really lethal, but the people have become dependent and can no longer breathe untreated air (much as they can't even think in the absence of the Machine's hum.)
Jan 10, 2021 at 5:21 comment added indigochild @NickMatteo Those sound like the same thing to me. In either case, the people in-universe believe that all life on the surface is dead and the environment lethal, so "post apocalyptic" seems like an okay description.
Jan 10, 2021 at 3:59 comment added Nick Matteo I don't think the situation at the beginning of The Machine Stops is meant to be post-apocalyptic per se, but more like a natural progression of our own civilization.
Jan 10, 2021 at 1:31 history answered indigochild CC BY-SA 4.0