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Study 020 - The Machine Stops - Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2022-11-24 15:00:08
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

It all comes screeching to a halt as we finish our coverage of E.M. Forster's science fiction tale The Machine Stops!

Special thanks to reader Levi Nuñez! Grab Music from the Book of the New Sun by Loot the Body now!

Next up: Extra Credit on DELTA GREEN!

Comments

Ricardo Madrid

I believe that the tabloids that are mentioned in the last chapter are the dietetic tabloids that Kuno mentioned earlier. This made me wonder if the Machine had caused a nutrient deficiency in humans the way the Jurassic Park scientists caused a Lysine deficiency in the dinosaurs so that if they ever left the park they would die. Perhaps the way the Machine discouraged people from leaving was by keeping them dependent on tabloids and the reason so many people were so incredibly weak in the end is because they weren't being supplied tabloids and were suffering from nutrient deficiency. Might be a sub-theme of dependence on Big Pharma to trail the main theme of dependence on Big Tech. It is much easier to unplug than it would be to try and go without insulin, lysine, or whatever else the Machine was putting into those dietetic tabloids.

Steve

Kuno's diatribe sounds a bit like the one I got from my grandfather when I showed him my Walkman. It included a section on those "horrible Americans" by which he meant the Beastie Boys, who it seemed were on their way to South London to steal the VW badge off the front of his car. The Golden Age is always in the past. And then we go in a Star Trek episode which will surely end with Kuno talking the machine to death.

Steve

Hopefully you'll have some mighty thews next week, as an antidote to this white pap. If I went out into the woods, I'd die.

STACIE SWANEY

So I got this on Audible thinking it would be a fun listen. The narrator is some kind of British accented fancy lady who is impossible to understand because I’m from Kansas and we don’t sound like that. Maybe you guys can read it to us because you make it sound interesting.

Jason Thompson

This was so UNBELIEVABLY awesome. “Humans becoming dependent on robots” is one of my favorite (and I think likeliest) apocalypses. I recommend the story “The Happy Breed” from Harlan Ellison’s anthology “Dangerous Visions” if you really want to roll around even deeper in misery. I love the detail of the worm-robots!!!

Jason Thompson

Also, like yourselves, I love the Hollywood ending where everything blows up dramatically

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Though clearly a warning about overdependence on technology, I do think there are equally good readings of this as a warning about any pervasive framework. Religion. Government. Workplace. All able to provide what you need right up until the moment they cannot.

Briar Ripley Page

It's kind of wild to me the pains Forster takes to make this NOT a super bleak ending despite all the carnage. Is humanity going to go extinct? No, there are still people living on the surface, waiting to rebuild civilization now that they don't have to worry about getting grabbed by machine worms anymore. But what if they just make the same mistakes all over again? No, they won't, they've learned their lesson. Hell, Kuno and Vashti even make up!

Thunk

Not related to this episode, but I thought people here might appreciate it: My kid got a Lego set for her 5th birthday. It was a little pet shop with a few outdoor props: table and chairs, and a sign for the shop, a sort of sandwich board thing. And some Lego figurines. A week after making it, and quite randomly, she asks me "Have you seen the sign? I'm looking for it." I ask "what sign?" I've got no idea what she's asking about "The yellow sign. It missing. I want it." starts to get upset "I can't find the yellow sign, help me look for it"

Jeremy Impson

Reminds me of Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron short story. Slightly different message. Both stories appeal to me, although less so recently as they are likely to be construed as supportive of prejudiced thinking against younger people.

DR

There is a species in star trek voyager called the ocampa whose history is very similar and was probably influenced a lot by this story. For them an alien species accidentally destroyed their ecosystem and the planet became a desert. The aliens felt so bad they made an underground city that was sealed off and everything was provided for them, but they became completely dependent on the alien caretaker whom they worship. Over the generations they grew weaker, losing their psychic abilities and their population dropped as well as their lifespan which was shortened to nine years.

Runninghead

This story isn't just prescient like a Wells or an Arthur C Clark story, it's downright spooky!! Loved the way it slowly expands an apparent utopia in to a oppressive, disturbing and increasingly claustrophobic nightmare. Seeing the way AI has developed in recent months gives this one an extra edge of meaning and plausibility. Chris talking about bush-craft training reminded me of a time I went camping with friends. I turned up late and they were having trouble starting a fire. They knew I had a background in forestry and a few other "out-doorsy" jobs so they asked me how I would get a fire going back when I did that sort of thing daily. They were kind of disappointed in me when I told them I'd just pour a little petrol on the wood from the tank of a chainsaw and chuck a match on it. 😅 I guess modernity has a way of impacting even the most rustic activities.

Cole Caron

If bushcraft is defined the same way Chad and Chris defined witchcraft, then anything made by a bush is bushcraft.

It's a Ghost.

This story totally plays into my fear of the internet collapsing, considering how much I do through it. Also, I was recently exploring Malmö, Sweden via Google Street View, which is the kind of thing that always amazes me that we have the ability to do today, and I came upon a really cool science fiction bookstore with an entire section on “Cthulhu and Lovecraft,” which made me really want to visit Malmö in person and made be wonder what Lovecraft would think if he knew that a bookstore in Sweden in 2022 would have an entire section dedicated to his works and works inspired by him.

It's a Ghost.

Also, here’s a music video of Tove Lo and the personal robot she ordered, which might be more relevant to Bicentennial Man, but I think also says something about living with people versus living with machines. https://youtu.be/CMWLX0KXwF4

Jim Cannon

By this half the story seemed to be using "the machine" as a euphemism for "religion," so its hard to tell if the story was about the dangers of technology or the dangers of organized religion and belief... but of course, as Homer once said, "It can be two things." An exploding airship is the cherry on top of this dystopic sundae.

Richard Haussmann

The only other time I've heard the name Cuno was in the video game, Disco Elysium. Cuno was a trash-talking, speed-addicted juvenile delinquent who taunts the likely psychologically damaged, amnesiac detective protagonist. It's a weird RPG/point-and-click story that fits with the sensibilities of the podcast.

Ben Gilbert

Another story with a similar theme about machines becoming perhaps too protective of humans is “With Folded Hands”, a novelette by Jack Williamson, known as the Dean of Science Fiction. He passed away in 2006 at 98 after a 70+ year writing career.

Michael Littlefield

This story reminds me very much of some of the writings of the Existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and I'm wondering if perhaps that's why E.M. Forster called this story a "meditation" at the beginning. If so it is a very narrative-driven meditation that seems to be almost the world of Dune before the Butlerian Jihad (i.e. man giving up all of their thinking and effort to machines to the point to where they became enslaved by other men with thinking machines). One could also say that E.M. Forster wrote this story in response to the rise of Scientism, which was the belief that Science could solve all of humanity's problems and that history was a continuous progression to some glorious future without strife. It sounds nice until one realizes that such a notion gave rise to the Eugenics movement (which we get a hint of when Kuno was not approved by the Machine to provide children) and everything that followed. This story does show that there really isn't any kind of societal progress. We merely replace one set of beliefs and superstition with another that turns out to only take away sense of purpose or grandeur rather than add or enlighten (The irony of Vashti saying how the Machine eliminated religion while she practically worships the machine and treats the Manual as some kind of religious text). The ending itself is quite a showcase of humanity sowing the seeds of its own destruction by placing too much trust and dependence on its creation to the point to where it seemed nobody knew how to actually maintain it.

Kvesti

Where is next episode? Someone has stopped the machine? I would have had smartass joke if I caught up two months ago. Referring Bicentennial Man's "world has changed so much I don't want live in it" talk.

Ben A

Great couple of episodes, guys! Thanks for covering this one, which I stumbled on almost twenty years ago and, at the time, likened it to the Matrix meets Brave New World (with a little bit of Logan's Run thrown in). One of the subtle elements I noticed this time around was the accurate creepiness where people kept using the Machine even as parts of it broke down and services became sluggish. There's a parallel to how some people, when accustomed to a technology, will put up with it not working optimally until it breaks. Think for example how reporters are predicting Twitter's impending loss of functionality and how people may put up with temporary outages until it disappears completely. It is an astute observation by Forster that such humans will work with suboptimal technology even when it is obvious that it needs maintenance. In this story it is because people have lost knowledge about how to control and repair the technology, but it may simply be borne from complacency (of the "someone else will fix it, so why should I?" variety).

Terrence Edwards

As prescient as this story is, I'm in my first read through of Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun (it's great). It's amazing to have this music to read to. I hope Chris and Chad can someday get to a Wolfe short story (he sadly passed in 2019) like the Island of Doctor Death -- I think chad would be on board with a title like that.

Z.A. Kahan

“Kuno doesn’t fucking care.”

Avlin Starfall

Had to pause the episode to write that the fact in the story where the machine, and in turn people, don't want you to learn through first hand experience was very interesting to me. As you all joked this podcast tells us, your listeners, a story filtered through you all so you all are giving the same sort of chain of learning, not from the direct source, but through a personal filter. It's a dangerous precedence but there's, in some cases, no other way to do it. Like the example of French revolution. We only can learn things through a person's account of what happened, then, if you don't speak French you have to go through another person's personal translation which could give a different perspective. I think from this very podcast some old stories that were translated from different languages and some parts didn't make a lot of sense and it was queried if the story had those issues originally or if it because of the translation either being poor or the fact there just wasn't a way to properly explain the particular element in language the story was being translated into. Now that I write all this I am not really sure my exact point I'm trying to make other than that notion really latched onto something in my brain and made me think of what all do we learn of directly and how many things are filtered and then how many filters has those things gone through. Then there's even the fact that the things we experience first hand are filtered through our own brain which could be missing things or focusing on certain aspects and not others. Just a very thought provoking moment in this story. It's incredible that it was written so long ago and it can bring forth so many ideas and questions.

James D

Thanks so much for covering this. We covered the story in English Lit. class, some time around 1987/88. I haven't thought about it much since until now. I recall in those pre-Internet dark ages, my teenage brain found The Machine Stops completely unengaging as a piece of SF - like a more tedious version of THX1138, the tale didn't speak to me at all. My teacher probably did her best to hammer a Communist allegory onto it, as was her particular axe to grind. The Machine? Communism. Sauron's realm in Middle Earth? Communist Bloc. The Witches in Macbeth? Poisonous Communist Propaganda. Now, of course, The Machine Stops is astoundingly prescient and clearly a good read. That difference of my perspective over the decades since Eng Lit. class is maybe what I take away the most.

Innsmouth Gold

Wow, amazing story, thanks for covering it. I have to say, this is not the type of story I associate with this author, it feels more in line with Ballard. It hit me on a few levels. Firstly, the accuracy of the effect of tech, as you mentioned, and its effect not so much on our material life, but our social lives. I have around 1500 "friends" on FB, I probably interact meaningfully with 10 of them. Who are all these other people? Secondly, the idea of reconnecting with nature. I run a martial arts, health and fitness school. We run regular outdoor sessions or camps. Not just on bushcraft, but also just to get people out and interacting with each other and the real world! We've found even an hour or two in the woods has a major beneficial effect on overall well-being, especially for those dealing with stress related conditions. Thirdly, our last but one Innsmouth Gold anthology, Corridors, had a very similar subterranean setting. Difference was, the particular version we asked authors to write about was under the sway of the Priesthood of the King in Yellow. It was interesting to see similar themes coming up - most notably that tension that exists between living in a safe, stable society, and having numerous limits placed on personal freedoms and expression. Great episodes, guys!

Andrew Trnacek

This story is incredible it could be a proto- matrix, wall-e, Brave New World etc What a great tale! Good choice.

Derek Scott

I really enjoyed the section where The Machine and it’s correlated parts began to breakdown. It reminded me of that large first section of the The Stand, where there’s an almost perverse charm and fascination with the post Captain Trips world or how Roland’s world is in a state of steady, but then rapid, degeneration through the Dark Tower series. Both of those stories, like this one, are all the more powerful given their similarities to our own world.

Professor Murder

Got some really enjoyable "Paranoia RPG" vibes off this story. All Hail Friend Computer!