The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster was written in 1909. It predates Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers by a couple decades. The light bulb was still a recent invention. Yet the world Forster wrote about is oddly recognizable.

It’s about a crazy world where everyone just sits alone in their room, staring at a screen and making reaction videos to other people’s reaction videos. The main character is a woman who’s fully invested in her reaction videos and is perfectly content with her life. But her son has this crazy desire to touch grass. Ridiculous! Sure, anyone can go outside and touch grass if they want, but why would they? All media feeds are on their screens, indoors! Besides, her son lives on the other side of the planet and everyone’s rooms look the exact same, so why bother going anywhere at all?

This is just a short story, less than 50 pages. Or if you enjoy audiobooks, it’s an hour and a half. And honestly, there isn’t much of a plot here. This is mostly the author imagining a horrible world where everyone lives their lives glued to technology and they don’t even see a problem with that. So a lot of the story is just the author describing that world. The son fills the role of “voice of reason” as he shouts at his mother for being so obsessed with her videos. And that’s where the author injects what he’s really trying to say with this story (as if it was subtle before that). Of course, this isn’t just a snapshot of life in this world, something has to happen. So towards the end of the story, the machine stops. Because if humanity becomes so reliant upon technology, what will they do if that technology goes away?

A lot of the story made me think of the humans from Wall-E if they never left their rooms. And I liked how the humans weren’t being forced to stay in their rooms like prisoners, they just… didn’t see any reason to leave. And that’s where this story feels proto-cyberpunk to me. It’s in the dehumanization through technology. These humans aren’t being subjugated by technology, they’re voluntarily using this technology. And it makes them less.

Since the story was written in 1909, it’s in the public domain. So you can read it or listen to it for free. I borrowed the audiobook on Hoopla and I thought the narrator did a great job of making the mother character always sound irritated by the minor inconveniences in her life. That feels accurate.

This short story isn’t exactly a masterpiece but it’s an interesting oddity from 1909 and isn’t a major commitment to read so I recommend checking it out.