E.M. Forster’s 1909 fable, ‘The Machine Stops’ - which depicts a world state in which the inhabitants live inside vast underground cities, isolated from one another except for an electronic mass communications network - is a powerful story of technological alienation. The science fiction tale not only comments upon a burgeoning screen culture but also on our diminishing capacity to visualise and share an alternative reality, writes Paul March-Russel.

‘Imagine, if you can’. These are the opening words to E.M. Forster’s fable, ‘The Machine Stops’, which was first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909. With the exception of his novel, A Passage to India (1924), which remains of interest to postcolonial scholars, Forster’s standing has slipped within the academy. Too many Merchant and Ivory productions, perhaps. At the same time, though, Forster’s sole foray into scientific romance has grown in stature since the early 1990s.

The meaning of ‘The Machine Stops’ has proved remarkably multivalent. The story has long been a staple of science fiction anthologies and, in 1966, it was filmed by Philip Savile for the BBC’s anthology series, Out of the Unknown. Then, the story’s tale of a world state in which the inhabitants live inside vast underground cities, isolated from one another except for an electronic mass communications network overseen by the titular ‘Machine’, commented upon a burgeoning screen culture. The production complemented other screen-obsessed science fictions of the period, such as Michael Frayn’s A Very Private Life and Nigel Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics (both 1968). Renewed interest in the story followed in the 1990s when it was taken up by cyber-theorists as a prescient account of virtual reality and the World Wide Web. By 2001, when Gregory Norminton adapted the story for BBC Radio 4, it had become a mordant warning about social isolation and gated communities. Nine years later, Randy Alfred’s Wired article read the story as an allegory for the limits of globalisation. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was routinely cited (alongside such texts as Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun [1957] and J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ [1977]) as an example of ‘lockdown fiction’. Rev Robert Willis, the former Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, read the story (ironically enough) on YouTube in 2020; in 2021, Paul Kingsnorth viewed the story through the lens of anthropogenic climate change; and only last weekend a new Radio 4 production was aired, dramatized by Philip Franks and starring Tamsin Greig. Along the way, ‘The Machine Stops’ has also been adapted to the stage, turned into a graphic novel and transformed into albums by Hawkwind and John Foxx.