A New Publication: The Machine Stops?
We're just getting started, but are welcoming your contributions.
The Machine Stops? is a venue for letters, conversations, essays and other written (and audio-visual) explorations into the E. M. Forster novella (short story) titled The Machine Stops. We have added the question mark to distinguish this Substack space from the novella itself.
The idea here is mainly to explore the novella for its contemporary cultural relevance as allegory, social commentary, social critique, etc. A special focus or emphasis at the beginning of these explorations will be comparisons of Forster’s Machine with what is called “the megamachine” by writers from Lewis Mumford to Fabian Scheidler.
To submit your articles, essays, conversations, letters, audio and video materials, etc., please email me, James R. Martin (editor) at jrivermartin at gmail dot com .
You can learn all about it here: What is The Machine Stops?
Okay I read the novella. It's reminiscent of the Matrix--perhaps inspired the Matrix. Its evocation of the excesses of humanity worshipping and being controlled by machines makes a good point but there was an element I really disliked--a paragraph I can't find now in which is expressed the idea that humanity had traded its glorious near godhood for this stupid sterile existence controlled by the Machine. I do think the ecomodernists who want to be downloaded into computers and be disembodied immortals is a case of trading your birthright for a mess of pottage--but the way this depicts humanity is problematic. I like the way Robin Kemmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass depcits humanity, as one of a network of living beings, surrounded by a web of All Our Relations. She laments the way her college students respond when she asks what positive thing humans contribute--and they can't think of any. The attitude that our species is a destructive marauder that the Earth would be better off without is the flip side of the attitude that we are the apex of Creation, the reason for the universe to exist, the shining endpoint of evolution. It's much more wholesome, and a necessary precondition for getting right with Mother Earth, to get over ourselves and understand that we are one link in the web of life, not the spider that constructed the web and harvests the bugs.