The narrator’s apology on behalf of “beautiful naked man” (122) and his nostalgia for the robust, technology-free body are, however, both problematic.
It concludes with the unsettling possibility that, as Forster’s story also implies, ‘the Machine’ is not, after all, the cause of our undoing, but simply a symptom of a deeply human process of disengagement - or alienation - from the world of which we form a part.Īs a prescient critique of telepresence technologies like the Internet, “The Machine Stops” satirizes hypermediated contact and in its place valorizes contact made with the fleshly body-so much so, that it fantasizes the removal of all technological mediations between that body and the “real.” This move carries strong ecocritical implications in its suggestion that all authentic connection-whether between people themselves or between people and the earth-must be corporeal. It also considers how and to what extent this two-fold but interlinked process – this overall effect of dissociation – is implicated in the destruction of the more-than-human world which the virtual has supplanted. Thus, it considers the role of technology, not only in mediating our relationship to the more-than-human world (culminating in a process of disembodiment), but its role in dissolving place into space, in a totalizing process of deterritorialization or displacement. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to extend Seegert’s analysis (with its focus on the ‘Fleshly Interface’ in Forster’s story) and emphasize the dimensions of space and place. Alf Seegert’s article (2010) is a notable exception.
The prescience of Forster’s story is, perhaps, self-evident, given humankind’s growing dependence on technology, and the extent and nature of its impact on the environment yet it has, to date, attracted surprisingly little critical attention, and still less attention from eco- or environmental critics. Entitled ‘The Machine Stops’, Forster’s story describes a dystopian future in which humankind has ravaged the surface of the earth, and retreated underground, where it has grown more and more dependent on ‘the Machine’ for its survival - with ultimately disastrous consequences, as Forster’s title signals. Forster is a writer few would associate with either science fiction or the short story, but in 1909, he published a remarkable example of both.
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