When I first read “The Machine Stops” I thought of it as a fairly straightforward postapocalyptic story: the Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable, which forces mankind underground to live in cities where every aspect of existence is controlled by the Machine. However, the more I reread the story and considered it, the more I came to see it as a work of genius.
Not only is it a thought-provoking meditation on the role of technology in our lives, it is also a graceful portrayal of faith and how easy it is to become so focused on worship of a thing—on a representation of the belief—that one can lose sight of belief itself. In the story, E. M. Forster leads his characters toward a very deliberate conclusion in which they ultimately understand, and accept, their fallacy. This is what I wanted to explore in my own story.
There is a moment in “The Machine Stops” when one of the characters makes his way to the surface through an old ventilation shaft and later recalls: “I thought I saw something dark move across the bottom of the dell, and vanish into the shaft.” This is where my story begins: What if that dark shape were a man from the surface, and what would happen to him if he became trapped in the Machine?