Audio Book Group: The Machine Stops

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.

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

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

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.

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.

FannyCornforth

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

Well, Early was getting apologetic about the length of her post. The TLDR comment was having an effect. All this only joking is what gets said afterwards. No. If it isn't meant, why say it, or is this the neuotypical supremacy of the way some people communicate in a peculiar manner that is seen as mainstream in action and socially desirable by some.

I was trying to help EP
You need to tone it down a bit

If it isn't meant, why say it, or is this the neuotypical supremacy of the way some people communicate in a peculiar manner that is seen as mainstream in action and socially desirable by some

Absolutely.
Don’t actually understand what neu(r)o typical has to do with anything but it was a silly flippant remark which was entirely unnecessary.
mea maxima culpa

If readers want to try gaining an experience of going somewhere where you have not been then trying Google stretview is a good experience.

www.google.com/maps

Then search.

Then drag the orange pegman and drop onto a blue line that will appear when dragging.

If you have problems doing this please ask.

A good place to have a look is by searching for

Clos lucé

as there is a theme park in the grounds of the place in France where Leonardo da Vinci lived the final years of his life.

One can move around the large grounds and view the exhibits such as panels with details of paintings that are hanging from trees.

Then one can try a Google street view experience of somewhere you already know well, like your home area and assess whether it is realistic or distorted in some way.

I regularly use Google street view and have found it useful for house hunting, seeing where friends live who have moved away, “revisiting” houses where I have lived and general curiosity.
It can be highly entertaining and time consuming

I imagine most people are familiar with Google Earth ?

Even I am!

What has google earth maps got to do with book club??

How about a new book ??

Have you seen Earlys thread about the new Book Club Lucca?

I have never participated in an online book club before but surely it should be on the lines of a RL book club (without the wine!) cannot see how we can discuss the book if "we" constantly digress.

Lucca

What has google earth maps got to do with book club??

How about a new book ??

Indeed

I’m going to bump the Book Club thread (or try to)

toscalily

I have never participated in an online book club before but surely it should be on the lines of a RL book club (without the wine!) cannot see how we can discuss the book if "we" constantly digress.

Sorry ?????

What about this book

Oh, if we can’t have wine, I’m not coming ?

There was a misunderstanding about the TLDR comment. All resolved offstage. Done and dusted and now back to the book.

Thanks for joining in toscalily. Yes, a twist on Darwinian thinking. The fittest are not allowed to survive.

We don’t know how this State has come about, do we? The only plants mentioned are ferns. We know that these are the oldest groups of plants on Earth and help make oxygen. We don’t know if the Machine age came about as a result of some catastrophic global event and Earth is now regenerating itself. There is precipitation: mist and snow and the air is breathable once acclimatized so it is possible to live above ground if there is food and shelter.

We know there is a Resistance, that anyone who doesn’t adhere to rules in the Book of the Machine is expelled and becomes Homeless. Kuno’s request to father children is refused.

The system has the strong killed to keep the population weak, compliant, dependent and alike apart from narrow cultural interests which may or may not be prescribed in the Book. It doesn’t need the classes of society depicted in Huxley’s Brave New World. It doesn’t need a workforce so physical strength becomes redundant.

But a population without practical skills is a dangerous precedent. As the Machine starts to deteriorate: malfunctions can’t be fixed, artifical light becomes poor, water stinks, food is mouldy, the artificial air is foul … and people just accept it. It’s not hard to see parallels in our 21C society. Concerns about our future power supplies, reduced access to medical care, food shortages, petrol queues … and we feel powerless to do anything. The failure of the French power plant in the book really struck me. I don’t know if anyone has read Rumaan Alam’s Leave The World Behind but that starts with a major power outtage in New York - the reason for it is never explained and can’t be discovered because all comms fail. The book is vague and inconclusive (and more about race and entitlement than survival) but one senses it’s the end of the world.

So what’s the moral of this story?

Lucca

What has google earth maps got to do with book club??

How about a new book ??

The reason I think it relevant here is that people in the story are not going out and are getting experiences remotely.

So I am suggesting that if people here try Google street view for having a look around somewhere like Clos Lucé it may provide insight into whether one can gain an experience to some extent of what somewhere is like without actually going there. Using Google street view is not the same as watching a video about the place.

For comparison here is a really nice long video with a continuous walk around the German city of Mainz, starting outside the railway station.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=scjLxGh17rA

I find dystopian works like this disturbing - not for the expected reasons of foretelling the future or pessimism, but I wonder how much of my reaction is with the benefit of hindsight.
Yes it is easy to equate the Book of the Machine with Google - but who could have predicted Google?
The concept of living underground in “cells” - does it foretell our insular existence communicating via Zoom and FaceTime- or does it merely look like that from our post pandemic perspective?
And as for the Machine winding down - well look at the NHS, immigration, social care, energy costs even fuel distribution -it could say it all.
But is our perception distorted?
There are so many apparent parallels but I wonder whether, had 21st century life been different, whether other parallels might equally have been drawn?

Interesting, Maw. We are getting into the realm of alt-histories. Are we?

I've just borrowed a library book of Forster's short stories so I havent read them yet. In the front flap it says he wrote The Machine Stops as a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H G Wells. I'm wondering if it was The World in the Air published in 1907 which has been interpreted as anticipating events related to World War I.

The basic assumption behind the plot is that immediately after the Wright Brothers's first successful flight in 1903, all of the world's major powers became aware of the decisive strategic importance of air power, and embarked on a secret arms race to develop this power (there is a reference to the Wright Brothers themselves disappearing from public view, having been recruited for a secret military project of the US government – as were other aviation pioneers in their own respective countries). The general public is virtually unaware of this arms race, until it finally bursts out in a vastly destructive war which destroys civilisation.

We know that air travel still exists in the Machine world but mostly only to convey people to their designated cell and civilization hasn't been destroyed.

But what if we, in the 20C/21C had had no air power?

Ah, what if……?
There are some excellent “alternative history” works aren’t there (racks brain trying to remember one!)
.