Aldiss calls Forster’s story ‘overpraised’ and dislikes the ‘moralising’ tone of Forster’s narrative. In his entertaining if often partisan Trillion Year Spree: History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss has very few words of analysis to offer about ‘The Machine Stops’, despite the fact that Forster’s short story foreshadowed and even directly influenced later authors of dystopian fiction. He learned that there are people who live outside of the Machine’s control.
He had reconnected with nature and with the land, land which he had only been able to experience as history, through lectures, before. He tells her about how he discovered that his room is located below Wessex, in south-west England, and that he climbed up onto the earth and saw the hills as the Anglo-Saxons had seen them in the long-forgotten past. Kuno chastises his mother for worshipping the Machine, and they argue.
Kuno has gone rogue by venturing out there by himself. People are allowed up to the surface, but only under supervised and permitted conditions. He is being threatened with ‘Homelessness’ (a euphemism which means death, since nobody can survive outside of the Machine) for daring to make his way out onto the surface of the Earth by himself, demonstrating personal agency and independence. When she arrives, Kuno tells her why he insisted on her travelling to see him: because he has something to tell her which he couldn’t tell her through the Machine. Vashti’s journey reminds her of her ‘horror of direct experience’: leaving her bubble or cocoon, the safety and familiarity of her room, and going out and being among other people causes her to become anxious. Airships have been preserved from a former age when people used to travel to visit things, whereas now everything is brought to them in their rooms. We are told that few people travel anywhere these days, because everywhere on the planet is virtually identical to everywhere else. However, Vasthi vacillates and initially refuses to go to see him, as she is reluctant to leave her room.Įventually, Vashti gives in and arranges to go and visit her son, and makes the journey via an airship. Kuno wants his mother to come and visit him where he lives in the northern hemisphere, as he wishes to experience the stars, not from an airship, but while standing on the surface of the earth and directly exposed to them. A mother and lecturer, Vashti, who lives in the southern hemisphere, talks to her son Kuno, who is in the northern hemisphere, via a round plate which functions as a sort of videophone.
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