The Machine Stops is a fine allegory of the precarious nature of civilisation.īut a 2020 review by the BBC’s excellent Will Gompertz highlighted an even more chilling aspect of The Machine Stops. So, too, the climax (the clue is in the title). The image of humans living alone in underground cells, sustained by a fickle and delicate machine, and a mother communicating grudgingly by video with her distant son, left an indelible impression on me. The only clue is that the characters travel across the world not by aircraft (the Wright Brothers had carried out the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk only in 1903) but by airship. We read it aloud in class and he invited us to guess when it was written. The Machine Stops: a two-fold allegoryĪ brilliant English teacher of mine at school in Manchester first brought my attention to this extraordinary story in 1973. What if someone wrote “a jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breath-takingly accurate literary description of lockdown life” under COVID in 2021? What if they wrote it in 1909?
“Beware of first-hand ideas!… First-hand ideas do not really exist.Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over.
Here are three quotations from The Machine Stops:
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