Audio Book Group: The Machine Stops

MayBeMaw

Well that's pretty comprehensive.
Follow that if you can!
(Although TBH, TLDR)

Many apologies- Early - mea maxima culpa - not aimed at you at all.

toscalily

When Vashti goes to visit her son she is described as "tottering" at various times, obviously not having the ability to stride out, weakened by her isolation. The reference to new born babies being selected for their lack of robustness and muscularity, those of a stronger nature killed off. Selective breeding being the opposite of what nature usually does, i.e the strongest & fittest survive to continue the race. Was this really what was intended by those who built the machine?

In read somewhere sometime ago an article with a title something like

The geeks have won

basically saying, if I remember correctly, that the twin cultures of schooldays with the sports people, tough, the girls fancied them, sports stars some of whom derided the so-called geeks with their "silly" ideas about computers and not out running about in sports stuff all the time had resulted in a society where the sports people had got older and slowed down but that the geeks had produced the modern world of computers in many homes and so on and had good jobs with high salaries, so although seen as wimps at the time they had triumphed over those who had ridiculed them.

Though that does presuppose, wrongly, that the gentle geeks would be as dismissive of people different from them as the tough guys had been of the geeks. But the gentle geeks are not like that.

I fear that you may have put your foot in it here

For heavens sake EP do not make a mountain out of a molehill!
We are chatting with friends on here!
It was a harmless comment from Maw.
No one has taken offence and none was intended

Early

Thanks, Casdon. Writing in 1909, health and fitness, as a leisure pursuit would have been the preserve of the Edwardian upper and middle classes. Charles Atlas marketed his first bodybuilding course in 1922.

The working classes kept physically fit through labour. Most worked in physically demanding jobs and walked. In the book, Kuno effectively had to go into training to prepare for his ascent to the Earth’s surface. People had lost their sense of space. He even had to rediscover the difference between what was Near and what was Far and visited all the different levels of platform to develop his sense of space and his muscles. Nowadays, unless you are someone doing a physically demanding job, life can be sedentary. The book’s opening page describes Vashti as swaddled lump of flesh with a face as white as fungus. Not a healthy image at all.

Yes, lockdown has made many of us realise how important real social contact is although some have decided they prefer the solitude or just being more selective about who they see.

Vashti is a very interesting character, absolutely immured in and conditioned by the Machine life but I sensed someone, at times, having to convince herself e.g. the second hand sighting of the sea there were ideas to be got from the sea and the deliberate shuttering out of the views from the airship, thinking over and over, No ideas here. She is interested but it has to come second, third or tenth hand. But then, is it necessary to experience things first hand? I’m thinking of Stef Penny's 2006 Costa winning novel The Tenderness of Wolves set in the Canadian wilderness. Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time of writing and did all her research in London libraries and never visited Canada

Quoting Nicholas Lezard's Guardian review:

The novel is set in 1867, about a century before her birth, and how she's going to get back to that time without a time machine escapes me. Besides, it is not necessary to visit the location of one's novels; Saul Bellow didn't go to Africa before writing Henderson the Rain King; nor, for that matter, did Julie Burchill visit Prague to write No Exit. Actually, you can easily tell, for slightly differing reasons, that neither author visited the scenes they wrote about. But Penney's evocation of the frozen lands of northern Canada couldn't ring truer if she'd spent months wandering through the land with nothing but a pack of huskies and a native tracker for company … I have a small amount of first-hand knowledge of the cold bits of the North American continent, and there isn't a syllable of her evocation that seems forced …

This is doubtless mostly due to her skill as a writer; but I wonder if her agoraphobia didn't play a useful part as well. It might be bad manners, both literary and personal, to bring this up as a means of evaluating the novel, but I can't help thinking that it is the affliction itself that makes her so very attentive to the desolate landscape. I'd imagine that all that wide open space is exactly what an agoraphobic fears most; in which case it is an act of bravery, and indeed of artistic honesty and good faith, which has made her confront and make use of her deepest fears.

There’s something to think on and I have posted far too much again but half of it is Lezard’s!

No you haven't posted too much.

You did not post too much before either.

Why oh why does someone post a downbeat quip of TLDR after you made such a great effort in participating in this thread just amazes me!

Thank you for your contributions. Reach for the stars. I hope that the TLDR comment does not put other people off writing nor confins them to their own machine-allowed cubicle of brevity.

When Vashti goes to visit her son she is described as "tottering" at various times, obviously not having the ability to stride out, weakened by her isolation. The reference to new born babies being selected for their lack of robustness and muscularity, those of a stronger nature killed off. Selective breeding being the opposite of what nature usually does, i.e the strongest & fittest survive to continue the race. Was this really what was intended by those who built the machine?

I agree Early, please carry on, I’m enjoying your insights.

EarlyNo need to apologise! It was clear that Maw said it lightly.
I just wondered what it meant!
I love your thoughtful insights

No the TLDR was about my previous long post and I've gone and done it again but then again, if you had the floor for a minute in a real life book chat you can cram a lot into that time.

Thanks, Casdon. Writing in 1909, health and fitness, as a leisure pursuit would have been the preserve of the Edwardian upper and middle classes. Charles Atlas marketed his first bodybuilding course in 1922.

The working classes kept physically fit through labour. Most worked in physically demanding jobs and walked. In the book, Kuno effectively had to go into training to prepare for his ascent to the Earth’s surface. People had lost their sense of space. He even had to rediscover the difference between what was Near and what was Far and visited all the different levels of platform to develop his sense of space and his muscles. Nowadays, unless you are someone doing a physically demanding job, life can be sedentary. The book’s opening page describes Vashti as swaddled lump of flesh with a face as white as fungus. Not a healthy image at all.

Yes, lockdown has made many of us realise how important real social contact is although some have decided they prefer the solitude or just being more selective about who they see.

Vashti is a very interesting character, absolutely immured in and conditioned by the Machine life but I sensed someone, at times, having to convince herself e.g. the second hand sighting of the sea there were ideas to be got from the sea and the deliberate shuttering out of the views from the airship, thinking over and over, No ideas here. She is interested but it has to come second, third or tenth hand. But then, is it necessary to experience things first hand? I’m thinking of Stef Penny's 2006 Costa winning novel The Tenderness of Wolves set in the Canadian wilderness. Penney suffered from agoraphobia at the time of writing and did all her research in London libraries and never visited Canada

Quoting Nicholas Lezard's Guardian review:

The novel is set in 1867, about a century before her birth, and how she's going to get back to that time without a time machine escapes me. Besides, it is not necessary to visit the location of one's novels; Saul Bellow didn't go to Africa before writing Henderson the Rain King; nor, for that matter, did Julie Burchill visit Prague to write No Exit. Actually, you can easily tell, for slightly differing reasons, that neither author visited the scenes they wrote about. But Penney's evocation of the frozen lands of northern Canada couldn't ring truer if she'd spent months wandering through the land with nothing but a pack of huskies and a native tracker for company … I have a small amount of first-hand knowledge of the cold bits of the North American continent, and there isn't a syllable of her evocation that seems forced …

This is doubtless mostly due to her skill as a writer; but I wonder if her agoraphobia didn't play a useful part as well. It might be bad manners, both literary and personal, to bring this up as a means of evaluating the novel, but I can't help thinking that it is the affliction itself that makes her so very attentive to the desolate landscape. I'd imagine that all that wide open space is exactly what an agoraphobic fears most; in which case it is an act of bravery, and indeed of artistic honesty and good faith, which has made her confront and make use of her deepest fears.

There’s something to think on and I have posted far too much again but half of it is Lezard’s!

I’m with it now Lucca sorry, just reread the relevant bit.

Casdon

I don’t think it can mean that Lucca, it’s a short story, only about 70 pages - unless you really didn’t like it?
FannyCornforth Pelaton is so expensive too, one for the real devotees! The idea that people would allow machines to take over their whole lives must have seemed plausible and tempting when cars, vacuum cleaners etc were all new and people had to work so hard just to keep their homes and selves clean, and without the fitness lobby that might be where we would be by now. Perish the thought though, I wouldn’t want Vashti's life!

I didn’t say TLDR by the way.
And Maw explained at 13.28 that didn’t mean the novella.

I don’t think it can mean that Lucca, it’s a short story, only about 70 pages - unless you really didn’t like it?
FannyCornforth Pelaton is so expensive too, one for the real devotees! The idea that people would allow machines to take over their whole lives must have seemed plausible and tempting when cars, vacuum cleaners etc were all new and people had to work so hard just to keep their homes and selves clean, and without the fitness lobby that might be where we would be by now. Perish the thought though, I wouldn’t want Vashti's life!

Ah well I didn’t get my apology for something recently either …..?

Ah! Thank you!
A bit like didn’t RTF(full! full! Calm down!)T then

(I never did get my apology after being accused of bringing GN to ‘an all time low’!)

Too long didnt read ??

Maw, what does TLDR mean?
I can’t work it out!

Casdon re the fitness stuff.
Notable how Pelaton has cornered that area of the ‘machine’ market now.
Bezos missed a trick there.
I’m surprised that Amazon Fitness didn’t come to pass.
The only draw back for the home fitness game is how small many of our homes are.
I suppose we had Wii fit and all that…
Sorry, I’m just thinking aloud!

Gosh my reading was very superficial compared with yours Early, but I agree with your analysis. For Question 2 you posed regarding what things about the way we live now that Forster missed, I think for me the main one was the ‘health lobby’ element. Obsession with fitness overtakes many people’s lives now, which prevents the machines doing everything for us (maybe we just use just different machines!). I also think people’s perspective has changed since the pandemic, most people now value the power of human contact more perhaps than they ever did when it was on tap. The environmental lobby, and value placed on nature is growing, which is not something valued in the book (except as a historical thing of interest) - although there are glimmers that Vashti does know this secretly although she doesn’t admit it even to herself.

Some information for anyone else who might prefer to listen rather than read. I have listened to the You Tube version read by a female (link provided by EP above). I preferred that to the other, male read version in the other link, both American, it is divided into three parts, lasting 1 hour 20 minutes.

MayBeMaw

Well that's pretty comprehensive.
Follow that if you can!
(Although TBH, TLDR)

Not the book - that is described as a novella scarcely more than a short story!

I have read it all. If I may express an opinion, I find it excellent. Thank you.

When I read

> Now this is basic schoolboy astronomy.

Hmm. Girls can do astronomy too.

Yep, I know. Too much. Just excited by the book and amazed at what Forster predicted.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Interesting points that you make, Casdon. We don’t know what has befallen earth to lead to the Machine state, whether humans engineered their own fate by over-reliance on technology. We don’t know what information and knowledge-bases people are allowed access to. We don’t know what has been lost and what is deliberately censored. For example, when Kuno is looking at the stars, it’s obviously (to us) that it is Orion but neither he not Vashti seem to recognize it as such. Now this is basic schoolboy astronomy. Ptolemy first catalogued Orion in the second century. How and why are they unaware of this?

We know that primary research is taboo. Beware of the first hand. Let your ideas be second hand. Tenth hand. No direct observation. After the age of litters, only the Book of the Machine seems to have survived and becomes the new religion. The faith is Undemoninational Mechanism. And yet Kuno does have knowledge of the past. He knows the history of King Alfred and the Danes. He is in touch with the rebels - those who have been expelled for independent thinking known as The Homeless - people who are hoping to start a new civilization once this one is over. Do any books survive in the rebel world or is there a network of storytelling about the old world?

We know too that this story is taking place not long after advances in air travel. The airship Vashti travels on is recognizable to us as first class jet-travel with individual compartments. There are windows with shutters of pliable metal, craft that can ascend and overfly the highest points on earth. Craft to keep pace with the sun or even outstrip it had been the aim of the civilisation preceding this. Racing aeroplanes capable of enormous speeds. Forster has predicted Concord here, hasn’t he?

It’s clear that Vashti has accepted the status quo, that the Machine controls her life. She lives in an artificially lit room, has several thousand friends and communicates through a blue screen. Public gathering had long since been abandoned. Forster, writing in 1909, has predicted something akin to the world of big social media. He has predicted other media platforms. The ten minute online lectures that Vashi engages in, for example, remind me of lockdown Zoom meetings.

Buttons for everything: food, music, clothe, medicine. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. Physical exercise is taboo. Any muscular, athletic child is killed. Man seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul. And … irritation - a growing quality of the accelerated age. It all sounds remarkably familiar.

There is so much to talk about in this book but more than enough from me. I’ll leave it there for now … but one more thing. When Kuno finds his way above ground he is captured and brought back by a machine he describes as a huge white worm. Lately, I’ve been watching the cult 1960s TV series The Prisoner on Britbox. Remember how every time Number 6 tried to escape, he was pursued by a huge white latex sphere that brought him back. So did this book inspire that series?

Anyone is welcome to join in here and I hope more do. We could discuss the book though October as Casdon suggests upthread so plenty of time to catch up.

The audio recordings are captioned for anyone who is hearing impaired but the print book is readily available - a mini Penguin is only 56 pages long so it’s a very quick read.

A very important and thought provoking book. Thanks again to FannyCornforth for first mentioning it.