(listen to episode on Spotify)
(Music: Chrononauts main theme)
introductions, recent reads
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and JM. How are you guys doing tonight?
Gretchen:
I'm doing well. I am now officially graduated with a bachelors.
Nate:
Congratulations!
Gretchen:
So that's pretty exciting.
JM:
Yeah, I'm doing good too. It's gotten pretty warm the last couple of days and it's kind of nice out. And I've got the windows open. Hopefully we won't have too much noise in the background because my neighborhood tends to get a little bit noisy. But we'll see if I have to close it up. We were going to do this on what we call Victoria Day and there would have been fireworks, but because we're recording a week later, that's not happening. So that's cool, actually.
Nate:
Yeah, we have a nice clean audio feed tonight, I think.
JM:
Yeah, otherwise, you know, it's not too bad doing a little bit of work and doing some reading and getting excited about doing this episode because I do feel like even though we have a really, really great conversation last time, the material maybe wasn't necessarily the best in some cases.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So I think this time we got a much better batch.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
So I guess before we get into tonight's stories, which is more or less going to be a continuation of what we did last time, namely artificial intelligence and robots and all the various associated things with that, you can find us on all the major podcast platforms, Spotify, Google, Apple, all that. We also post our episodes on YouTube. You can follow us on Twitter at ChrononautsSF and you can also check out our Blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com where we post a number of hard-to-find and original translations of stories, one of which we'll be taking a look at tonight and certainly there's been a lot of activity on the blogspot over the last couple of weeks. We've got a lot of new stories up there from the 1920s Soviet Union, the first of which we will talk about tonight, but there's going to be a lot more activity on there in the next couple of weeks. So check out what we posted so far and stay tuned for some more stuff.
So I guess before we get into tonight's stories, which again, focus on AI and robotics and that kind of thing, I just kind of briefly wanted to touch on some of the non-podcast stuff we've been reading since the last time. What have you guys been reading that you might want to share with our listeners?
JM:
Well, I've been reading "The Three Impostors" by Arthur Machen, that's my second read of this the first time was not quite 20 years ago, but getting pretty close now probably. Well, I've discovered a lot of sort of the more obscure weird fiction around the same time, maybe 2005 or so. I remember, I don't know, probably within this space of a year reading many books that sort of became favorites.
"Arcturus" was one, that is "A Voyage to Arcturus" by David Lindsay, which we talk about a lot. Now, "Circus of Dr. Lao" by Charles Finney, some Algernon Blackwood for sure, and this one, which is a reread for me, and it's kind of following on from "The New Arabian Nights" by Stevenson that I was talking about last time. This is a very similar structured story in the sense that it's kind of interconnected short stories that kind of form a very loose sort of sprawling narrative. And it's a bit more of a mystery than "The New Arabian Nights". I actually think even though I enjoy Stevenson's writing style a lot, I do think I like this book better. I think it's very similar and I can see why at the time I think people said he was maybe ripping off Stevenson a little bit in terms of the structure, but Stevenson himself was clearly ripping off the "Thousand One Nights", so why not, right? It's a weird story with these, it's got a bit of a detective angle to it, but sort of unconventional and the individual weird components are told to a couple of people who get to listen to people's strange experiences and it all kind of ties together at the end a little bit. It's sort of difficult to, I can't really say necessarily it's the tightest thing ever, but it works that way. There's a lot of ambiguity and you're kind of questioning by the end what bits you've heard are true and which ones might be fabricated and what the three imposters of the title are actually really up to and that sort of thing. So I had a lot of fun with, I've been having a lot of fun with that, revisiting that. I've also been reading some of the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. I'm pretty new to her. I read a story a few months ago and then before that I read the one in "The Dark Descent".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
"Good Country People".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Which was really good and now I've sort of been digging into the complete short stories and yeah, I really like them. They're really, I don't know, they're really bleak. They're pretty, I don't know, they definitely are very clever and well done and there's a lot of like empathy in unexpected places, but in general, I find them to be pretty damn depressing, but I don't mind that. Really.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've been a fan of O'Connor for a while and I read a lot of them back in high school, the ones that I have read. I really enjoy her writing and there's a lot that I still would like to check out.
Nate:
Yeah. I've only read the one from "The Dark Descent", but it's very good Southern Gothic stuff. Yeah.
JM:
I was going to ask Nate if he'd read any of the other ones.
Nate:
No, I have one of the anthologies, but I haven't got my way through it yet.
JM:
Yeah. There's also her novel, "Wise Blood".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Which I first heard about looking into the album by a Corrosion of Conformity that just named after the, I don't know, it's one of those albums that I kind of like more now than I did at that time. It's kind of cool, heavy Southern rock kind of feeling to it. I didn't want to listen to that kind of stuff in 1996, but I don't know. I'm cool with it now. Yeah. What about you guys?
Gretchen:
Besides the podcast reading, I have only read a couple of books recently. I did go through a little bit of a burnout phase after I finished up my semester. But yeah, but I did just finish before like early today. This book called, and I never know how to pronounce it. It's K-Z-R-A-D-O-C-K, "The Onion Man", which is this book from, I think it's from 1910 or 1912, which is this weird like Danish pulp novel. And it's written like kind of in the sort of like pulp detective style, but it's like got all this weird surrealist imagery. It was a really interesting read and it wasn't too long.
JM:
It sounds really cool.
Nate:
Yeah, it does.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it was really, it was really bizarre and it was really cool to read. And besides that, I also read before that this book, "The Wall" by Marlen Haushofer, which is 1960s, it's German. And it's kind of a dystopian type nuclear holocaust sort of story, but also it's really different where there's this one woman who survives because she's like blocked in by this invisible wall. It's her living with no one else except like these animals that happen to be in the area. And it's considered sort of this response to like "Robinson Crusoe" in a way by like how she's writing about her experiences sort of being isolated from all humanity that has passed that in this version has passed away.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But yeah, it was a really interesting read as well.
Nate:
Yeah, it sounds pretty cool. Yeah.
Gretchen:
And besides that, I've mostly been watching movies and some TV shows.
JM:
So I haven't really been watching much of anything lately, but we did watch "Phenomena" recently.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah. No, I haven't really watched anything either. I've read Dickens' "Bleak House" listening to the audio book that was on LibriVox. Mil Nicholson is a Dickens narrator that has a lot of really good LibriVox recordings. I think she does it better than some of the professional ones, which is always nice to say about LibriVox. And it's definitely one of my favorite.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, it's touch and go sometimes, but when you get something good, you get something good. It's kind of pleasing, right?
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
JM:
And there is a chance that we'll come up again at the end of the episode. Although we have to see because we have to determine our next host choice, which will be the nice fun thing we get to do at the end of the episode.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. So in addition to that Dickens, I've also read one Faulkner novel, "The Reivers", which is kind of him doing a take on the picaresque novel of, you know, this motley crüe of people getting into wacky adventures and stuff, and that I'm also doing right now his novel "Intruder in the Dust", which is kind of more of a Southern Gothic murder mystery type thing. But both of them I really like a lot. And yeah, there's some of the better ones I think that I've read by him both on the shorter end and less difficult than some of his more well-known works, but I think just as enjoyable nonetheless.
JM:
Cool.
Gretchen:
I did at some point this summer want to read something by Dickens because I had been talking about him with like a professor before the semester ended. And he did recommend "Bleak House" and said it was like his favorite of Dickens.
Nate:
Yeah. It's kind of hard for me to rank my top three novels. I think between that one "Our Mutual Friend" and "Dombey and Son". They all have things that I really, really like about them. They're all very long novels and they have enormous cast of characters like they're the kind of novels where there's like 25 different characters that all kind of cycle through and interact with one another. "Bleak House" can take a little bit to get going, but once it does, it's just really, really good. And it's just kind of hard to put down.
JM:
I've wanted to read that one for a while and I actually did start it at one point, but I guess maybe it was that it was taking a while to get going. And it's one of those things that I put aside. I've not like, I guess sometimes it's a mood thing and don't remember how far I got. So I'm probably going to restart it obviously at some point when I do decide to read it. I've read, I've read some Dickens and I do like him, but there's a lot of his stuff that I haven't read and "Bleak House" is the one that it seems like one of those books along with maybe "Great Expectations" that's very, very highly regarded in comparison to some of the other ones.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
I want to read it for sure. It is very long, but that's not necessarily a stumbling block, but I guess I've been so used to reading shorter things lately that like even just tackling "Moby Dick" last year was like, Oh, wow, I read a long book.
Nate:
Cool. Well, it's certainly much longer than "Moby Dick" and I can definitely again recommend the audio book version on Librivox that Mil Nicholson does. She just does an absolutely fantastic job with the narration and really gets into all the characters of which, you know, there's a whole bunch. So yeah, definitely recommended there. So yeah, what do we got going on tonight? I think our first story is going to be also in English author, right?
Gretchen:
Yes.
(music: eerie echoey synth noises)
E.M. Forster background, non-spoiler discussion
On January 1st, 1879, the son of Alice Clara Whichelo, who went by Lily, and Edward Morgan Forster was born. Though originally they had settled on the name Henry Morgan to honor a member of the family, Edward Morgan Forster had written his own name on the registration for the official records instead.
Thus, through a bureaucratic error, E. M. Forster got his name and would be called Morgan to differentiate himself from his father. Unfortunately, his father would pass away soon after on October 30th, 1880 of tuberculosis. Widowed at the age of 25 with very little money on her side of the family, Lily spent a stifling year in the household of Morgan's great aunt Mary Ann Thornton who had the finances to support them. However, she soon resisted their control of her moving into a home shared only by her and her son. The arrangement of mother and son living alone together would remain the case until Lily's death. While Lily initially educated her son and later hired a tutor to school him at their home, she eventually sent him to school.
He went first to Kent House School where he was extremely homesick and dismissed by his fellow classmates who called him Mousy. His time there came to an end in 1891 and after moving to a new home, Lily enrolled him in another school, Tonbridge School where he experienced intense bullying by the other students. Later in his life, when thinking about what he would say if he were invited back to the school to speak, he wrote, "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and bies, school was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature for it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful the world can be and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are, there's a better time coming."
He has a lot of great quotes, but that was a really good speech.
JM:
You know what he has too many great things to say about English boys schools, and the late, late 1800s. Nate:
Yeah, that certainly seems to be the running theme here.
Gretchen:
Having endured Tonbridge, he was offered entrance to Cambridge's King's College in 1897, though he still felt unprepared. It was, though, at King's that his intellectual and personal character and beliefs began to form and where he forged significant bonds that lasted throughout his life. At King's College, Forster met Hugh Owen Meredith. Though Forster had already begun to question Christianity and his faith, Meredith aided him in further accepting his atheist stance.
He also was Forster's first love, though the two men never had a sexual relationship. They did have a romantic one. Later, Meredith followed societal expectations and married, something Forster was disappointed in and based one of his characters in the posthumously published "Maurice" on him. Meredith also was responsible for Forster's election into the college's intellectual society known as the Apostles, sponsoring his inclusion in the group. The society consisted of a number of future notable figures, including publisher and Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard Woolf, economist Maynard Keynes, and philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore.
Another intellectual development for Forster came when a don, Nathaniel Wedd, encouraged his writing. Forster went on to contribute pieces for Cambridge magazines like the Basileon, pieces such as "On Cycling" and a skit based on "Agamemnon".
As his time at Cambridge drew to an end, he was further advised to follow journalistic pursuits given his inability to pass the exams required to become a don. The first thing he did when leaving Cambridge was to go on vacation with his mother to Italy, something I wish I could do when I finish college and won't know what to do with my life. It is fun to see certain people during this time like, oh, I don't know what I'm going to be doing. I'm going to go on a trip.
Nate:
Yeah, it's certainly very nice, I would imagine, especially in the, I'm sure, luxurious accommodations they took on the road with them.
Gretchen:
Yes. While his time in Italy would highlight the growing rift and resentment between Forster and Lily, it would also fuel his creative endeavors. He wrote his first short story there, "The Story of a Panic", and some of his nonfiction writings about Italy later informed his novel "A Room with a View". He wrote another short story when traveling in Greece a year later, similar to "Story of a Panic", called "The Road from Colonus".
Though these trips did fuel "A Room with a View", he put it aside for other works. The year 1904 saw Forster start and complete his first published novel, "Where Angels Fear to Tread", fully planned his second, "The Longest Journey", and published the two aforementioned short stories along with several others that would later be collected in the collection "The Celestial Omnibus".
Along with these fictional works, Forster was also publishing some of his travel essays and other nonfiction in The Independent Review, a magazine founded by some of his friends from King's College and was teaching courses at the Working Men's College in London.
"Where Angels Fear to Tread" was published in 1905, garnering good reviews, and "The Longest Journey", Forster's personal favorite of his novels, was published two years later. The year after, Forster had a chance to meet Henry James, which had me thinking of when he was covered by the two of you on the podcast.
Yeah, it's a very interesting story. Although he looked forward to the meeting, it didn't go as expected. First, James misheard Forster's name and took him for someone else, a fact Forster initially was too bewildered to correct as James conversed with him under this impression. Second Forster was disappointed by his own impression of James, thinking he had taken on the worst of English character.
JM:
So that sounds like something out of a Henry James story too, doesn't it?
Nate:
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting connections with Henry James, with him and the various people lives that we've covered too. It's kind of interesting how that whole thing comes about.
Gretchen:
I didn't include too much of it, but reading Forster's biography is really like a who's-who of like early 1900s thinkers and important figures.
JM:
That's cool.
Gretchen:
I did want to include that because I was thinking about like how you two had reviewed James.
Nate:
Sure, yeah, "In the Cage".
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, some more of those are going to come up later too.
Gretchen:
He later deeply criticized James's work. As Wendy Moffat writes in Forster's biography, "James's novels were beautifully designed. He acknowledged that, but their pattern is woven at what sacrifice. Worst of human life has to disappear, all fun, all rapid motion, carnality, et cetera, and nine-tenths of heroism. Mamed creatures can alone breathe in his pages."
So not much of a James fan after that.
JM:
No, it seems not. Interesting.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of on the fence with him sometimes. Sometimes he really annoys me. Sometimes his stuff can really work, but yeah, he's an interesting author to say the least, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I did enjoy "Daisy Miller", but I do think I went in kind of expecting I wouldn't like it, so I think I was surprised. I would like to read some more to see if I felt the same way.
JM:
Oh, I might have to read some more too, but it's not near the top of my list. I mean, I've read a couple of shorter things, but they all seemed longer than they were, because there was so much dialogue of characters not saying any of the important things to one another.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't think we talked about before. Right? Yeah, obviously talent, but then again, he did say you should read his stuff very, very, very slowly to get the full effect, and maybe that way it annoys you less, but nothing ever happens for years and years.
Gretchen:
After finishing and publishing "A Room with a View" in 1908, Forster planned and wrote his penultimate novel published while he was alive, which would become "Howard's End", a book which, when published in 1910, fully secured him as a literary celebrity. Unfortunately, he began to feel stifled creatively. He wrote, "main causes of my sterility, one, inattention to health, curable, two, weariness of the only subject that I can and may treat, the love of men for women and vice versa, three, depressing and innervating surroundings. My life's work, if I have any, is to live with a person who thinks nothing worthwhile."
Soon, Forster would travel again, going to India to visit a friend and a man with whom he had fallen in unrequited love with, Syed Ross Masood. From late 1912 to early 1913, he journeyed through India and observed first hand the way colonization corrupted the English people living there. His experiences later influenced his writing of "A Passage to India", though it was a decade before he finished it. After returning to England, Forster met the writer and activist Edward Carpenter, an openly gay man who lived with his partner George Merrill. Seeing the two men happily living a domestic life together, something Forster himself dreamed of, he was inspired to start writing his novel "Maurice", even as he knew he wouldn't be able to publish it. He shared it among a small circle of friends, finishing the first draft in 1914, though he continually revised it throughout his life.
Also in 1914, World War I broke out. Initially, Forster didn't enlist, instead taking on cataloging paintings at the National Gallery as a civilian war assignment. His lack of action was looked down on by those calling for soldiers as well as ardent pacifists as he didn't outright criticize the war, as it seemed to them. Eventually, he was forced to enlist for wartime service, taking on the role of searcher in the wounded and missing department with the Red Cross, where he tended to and recorded the stories of soldiers injured on the battlefield.
His post was in Alexandria in Egypt, where Forster stayed for the next three years. During these years, besides writing the accounts of the soldiers he cared for, he also wrote entries in the newspaper The Egyptian Mail. He also had his first sexual encounters, including with someone with whom he developed one of his strongest relationships, what he later called one of the two greatest things in his life, a young Egyptian man named Mohammed El Adl. Even after El Adl's father and brother died, and he was set to marry his brother's widow, the marriage plans didn't dampen their relationship. In fact, when the couple soon had a child, born several months after Forster returned to England, they named it Morgan in his honor. Unfortunately, the child died soon after its birth, and El Adl passed away not too long after that.
Forster, who had spent more time in India further fueling his final novel, was luckily able to travel to Alexandria and see his lover once more, but he was not present during El Adl's last days. He received a letter from the man in May 1922, though he was already dead by the time it reached Forster, reading, "Dear Morgan, I am sending you the photograph. I am very bad. I got nothing more to say. The family are good. My compliments to mother. My love to you. My love to you. My love to you. Do not forget your ever friend, Mo El Adl."
Still suffering from the loss of El Adl, Forster published a collection of his Egyptian essays, "Pharos and Pharillon" as a tribute to his lover. He also continued work on "A Passage to India", which he finished in 1924, supported in his endeavor by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Around its publication, he was discussing literature with the former Woolf, to whom he remarked that he didn't think of himself as a novelist. When she responded in the affirmative, he seemed pleased with her agreement. It was a moment that proved Forster's decision not to publish any more novels, though he would write fiction merely for himself, works only available to the public after his death, and he did continue to publish as a critic and journalist.
"A Passage to India" became a bestseller, earning him the James Tait Black Award for fiction, as well as an abundance of money and royalties. Although Forster became fairly wealthy, this point in his life saw him connect more with the working class. Through a young poet named J. R. Ackerley, he was introduced not only to gay spaces in London, but also a new lover, a working-class policeman named Harry Daley. Through Daley, Forster became acquainted with a circle of friends from the same class. Forster's relationship with Daley eventually fell apart, but it was through Daley that Forster would meet another policeman, Bob Buckingham, who would become Forster's lover for the rest of his life.
This didn't mean that the relationship wasn't without some difficulties. In 1932, Forster learned that Buckingham would have to marry a woman named May Hockey, who was pregnant with his child. After the marriage, Forster was incredibly jealous of May, often losing his temper and lashing out at May in his diary entries. This change in attitude was not just caused by the marriage, Forster was also suffering from the loss of several friends, including Edward Carpenter and George Morrell, painter Dora Carrington, and the most recent blow, King's College don and political theorist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who had given Forster his papers shortly before his death, caused by complications from a surgery.
In his grief, Forster turned to the one thing that helped him after El Adl's loss, writing. He decided to write a biography of Dickinson, which aided him during this period and gave him joy, reminding him of what he had admired about his friend. His relationship with the Buckinghams also soon improved. Forster and May Buckingham grew to respect and admire each other, understanding each other's mutual love for Bob.
When their baby was born, the Buckinghams named it Robert Morgan, the second child to bear Forster's name. Two medical emergencies, Forster undergoing prostate surgery, the same procedure that Dickinson had died from, and May's suffering from tuberculosis, did result in the two becoming closer, as they visited and cared for each other while Bob was at work.
As World War II drew near, Forster once again found himself stuck in between two camps. He adamantly condemned the Nazis, but he also was uncomfortable with the extreme nationalism that was growing in Britain. He was offered the chance by the BBC to deliver occasional radio broadcasts, during which he pointed out how similar the patriotism and racial pride found in Britain was to Nazi ideology, and also criticized anti-Semitism found in his home country. There were also stronger crackdowns on gay people during this time, as the British government became more concerned with ideas of purity. Yet Forster continued to both speak on his thoughts in his BBC broadcasts and write for himself, Keegan Journal, where he composed a canon of gay literature. Friend and fellow writer Christopher Isherwood wrote that "Morgan is as anxious and afraid as any of us, and never for an instant pretends not to be. But actually, he's the last person who would ever go mad. He's far saner than anyone else I know, and immensely superhumanly strong. He's strong because he doesn't try to be a stiff-lipped stoic, so he'll never crack. He's absolutely flexible. He lives by love, not by will. My England is E.M., the anti-heroic hero with his straggly straw mustache, his light, gay baby blue eyes, and his elderly stoop."
Forster also had support of American artists during this time, as a group of them wrote to Forster of their admiration of his work and struck up a correspondence. These Americans also provided him with food unavailable in wartime England. Soon after the war, Forster suffered another personal loss, the death of his mother, Lily. She died with her son by her side. When she said she couldn't last much longer, he replied, "No, but your love will."
And he later stated that he "died partly when my mother did, and must smell sometimes of the grave."
Despite the often turbulent relationship he had with her, he was able to re-examine his life with her and feel less resentment than he had previously felt towards Lily. After her death, the lease on their shared home ran out, and he had to find another place to live. Luckily, at this time, King's College offered him a set of rooms with no expectations of teaching and offer he accepted. He lived at Cambridge for the rest of his life.
During the late 1940s, Forster visited America twice, once by himself to lecture at Harvard alongside T.S. Eliot and the next time with Bob Buckingham, so that the latter man could meet the friends who had first reached out to him during the war. It was between these visits that Forster worked with composer Benjamin Britton on an opera, inspired by American literature, an adaptation of Herman Melville's story "Billy Budd".
Besides this, Forster worked on several more posthumous stories during the 1950s. In 1961, though, tragedy struck again when the Buckingham's son, Robert Morgan, was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, an illness that led to his death a year later. During the rest of the 60s, faced with the many deaths he had experienced through his life and aware that his time was coming soon, Forster decided on who would handle his biography when he passed and had arranged for Christopher Isherwood, who had urged him in the past to publish "Maurice" to receive the manuscript of the novel and the stories to be released after his death. He made peace with the coming end of his life.
It was in May of 1970 that Forster suffered the second of two strokes. He was brought by Bob to his and May's home where he spent his final days. On June 7, 1970, at the age of 91, Ian Forster passed away, surrounded by his family.
Nate:
Definitely a very interesting life he led. It's kind of an interesting parallel with Butler, who we covered last time and that his most personal novel is the one that was published after his death, I guess for obvious reasons.
JM:
Right. Yeah. With Butler, it was more like, oh, I don't want to insult the people in my family or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And there is partially a reason he said he didn't publish "Maurice" is because he didn't want his mother to see it.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
And he's, I think it was Isherwood who said, like, look at all these other writers who are publishing like gay literature. And he's told that he responded by saying, well, I don't think any of them have mothers like mine and didn't want to have it published.
JM:
Yeah. It's quite a long life as well compared to some of our other authors today, which we'll get into it. That's interesting because he really lived through a lot and it seems like even though there was a lot of melancholy and stuff in certain parts of his life, he lived very full and the fact that he had other works that were still to emerge after his passing and kind of changed his whole method of operation because he was still writing, right? But yeah.
Gretchen:
And a lot of them are still sort of obscure and seem to be in only like certain collections and some of them seem to be like out of print or like harder to find. So there's definitely a lot of work that he did that just kind of went unheard of while he was alive.
Nate:
Yeah. It's interesting how that happens. I mean, the only one I've read before this was "A Passage to India" and my first exposure to that was through the film, which I didn't really care for that much. So when I read the novel, I was like, I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about this, but it turned out like I really liked the novel.
JM:
Yeah, it sounds really interesting. I'd like to read it.
Gretchen:
Yeah. The only two Forster works besides the one we'll be reading tonight that I had read was "Maurice". I did actually read that one. And then I ended up reading "A Passage to India" and I think both are really good. "A Passage to India" is a really great novel.
Nate:
Yeah. I'd certainly like to read Maurice as well, but yeah, I was definitely, I liked how he handled the subject matter and the passage to India, which the film was a little clumsy about. But yeah, it's really good. And certainly this one that we read tonight was outstanding.
JM:
So this is the only Forster that I had previously read. I actually read this story in 2020 for the first time. I think not long before we started the podcast, but I think it was before that time, what I believe I remember. So it's kind of an interesting time to be reading it.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Definitely quite relevant at that time.
Nate:
Yeah. For sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I had not read it until reading it for the podcast. Forster's story, "The Machine Stops", is what we'll be covering tonight. And while not the only science fiction work Forster wrote, though that does seem to be a common misconception, it is the only one published during his lifetime.
It was originally published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909, but later was included in the collection "The Eternal Moment and Other Stories" from 1928. Forster noted himself that he was inspired by H.G. Wells when writing it, but it is also likely that he was inspired by Samuel Butler, who we had of course discussed last month.
He had not only at one point started to write a book on Butler before World War One, but also had written a piece on Butler speaking of his influence on English literature in 1913. Not to mention that the story contains a possible reference to "Book of the Machines" from "Erewhon".
Nate:
Yeah. It was one of the things, well, I guess one of the many things that it reminded me of.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And knowing now like that it seems Forster was a fan of Butler, I do feel like he most likely was inspired by him to write this.
JM:
And it's interesting that like I kind of going back to that particular story, which we talked about last time "Erewhon", I kind of wonder, I mean, they were printed in essays earlier in a New Zealand newspaper, that whole thing about "The Book of the Machines". Like I kind of wonder if that was actually what Butler knew would be the legacy of "Erewhon". But I kind of wonder, I started wondering about that, especially while reading the Forster.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Like he knew.
Nate:
I'm not entirely sure because like we didn't get into the sequel that much aside from the brief summary that I read of it, but it doesn't seem like they really follow up on that element of it at all. It seems more like a religious satire type of thing of him getting whatever gripes he had off his chest of the things that had passed and however many 30 years or so that since "Erewhon" was initially published, but with Butler, I mean, it seems like the work he really wanted to be known for was "The Way of All Flesh". I think "Erewhon" was just kind of the first major success he had in the publishing world and kind of dominated his legacy of being in the public eye after that.
JM:
It was a posthumous book too though, right?
Nate:
Yeah. But it's what he wanted to be known for as an author.
JM:
So he didn't care. He didn't care that he wouldn't be alive.
Nate:
Right. He specifically said that. He said basically, you know, the real test of an author isn't being measured by whatever is popular, whatever passing trend is happening, but a long-lasting influence, something that's going to be read 100, 150 years from now, and I guess...
JM:
Right, after I'm gone. Yeah.
Nate:
Right, exactly. Yeah. And I guess with that, it turned out to be right.
JM:
But to have your real masterwork not be something that you ever receive any accolades for, I think that's beyond the conception of a lot of people.
Nate:
Butler certainly seemed like a strange fellow. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Something that I did read the piece that Forster wrote on him and he seemed to acknowledge how strange of a figure Butler was.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's a really interesting piece because he kind of writes it in a similar way to "The Machine Stops" where it's like this meditation on all of English literature is being made in this like factory. It's like very specific writers in specific categories. And then it's like Samuel Butler, he describes as someone who's like mucking up the works and sort of like doing his own thing and doesn't really have like a place that's like made for him. So yeah, it seems like Forster was quite aware of how unique Butler was and how the variety of his work besides "Erewhon".
Nate:
Yeah. Right. All of his essays and all that stuff of the religious commentary and whatnot. Yeah.
JM:
Well, while reading this one, I couldn't help but think about all the later things that it felt like, which was really remarkable to me. I didn't even like, you know, until we started really talking about it, I wasn't even thinking that much about like Butler and stuff like that. Although now I can clearly see, yeah, probably he was reading "The Book of the Machines". And maybe he was commenting on Wells' technological progressivism, but I don't know. I think Wells is more nuanced than that. He's not, he never like, I think, I think to some people, he can seem a bit cold sometimes, you know, in his like future speculations of technology and stuff. But I think definitely there's a lot more to him than that. So and I'm sure that Forster knew that because it sounds like a lot of these people hung out together and we're going to be talking about Wells and George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton and stuff a little later. So it's interesting that that literary circle seems to have quite an influence as well. But and Henry James was certainly involved in that and he knew Forster too and I don't know.
It's really remarkable, like, just kind of, it's not a perfect story. I mean, in my opinion, perhaps he belabors, I don't know, he belabors something a little bit too much like he's being so inventive and in a lot of ways he's letting the happenings and the way the main character is thinking and stuff speak for itself. But sometimes he just gets a little bit strident, like, especially at the end of the story. I'll just bring that up after we talk about it, but it's kind of like, all right, I understand. You think the machine is really, really bad and like, we shouldn't depend on the machine. I get it. Right. But I think at the end, he even says humanity has learned, had learned its lesson, just like so on the nose, you know, like, I don't even think Wells would have been quite that on the nose. But yeah.
Gretchen:
There isn't as much nuance here. Even in this interview, he did say like the message of the story was sort of like looking to the past and it is very like kind of technology is evil, in a way. But I still think that the way he does it is very interesting. And I think like, like you were saying, I do believe it's pretty ahead of its time. It was through like seeing interviews and stuff that I saw that he was inspired by Wells and it was truly he confirmed he was inspired by Wells and perhaps Butler. But I also was thinking more along the lines of later literature as I was reading it.
JM:
Especially "Brave New World" by Huxley.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of things that it reminded me of, I guess, one earlier and later thing were the two Kipling stories that we had read on the podcast, the ABC stories. The first one was published earlier than this and the second one was later than this. And they both do very similar things with the world building aspect and where we get this like crazy futuristic world that has its whole backstory that we never really get. We're just kind of thrown into the world and its mechanisms and how it operates on a daily basis.
JM:
And you know, the interesting thing is it feels a lot those stories like this one and the "Night Mail" stories from Kipling from around the same time period. And they feel a lot more real science fiction than what a lot of the pulp adventure stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
And it's interesting because these are like, well known literary figures of the time writing this stuff, right? And they don't have any trouble just waking up one morning and going, oh, it's the future now. Like, everybody else has to be like, well, create this elaborate framing device and have somebody dream into the future. It's so ponderous, right, in comparison, this just throws you there and it's great. It's like so immersive. It's very chilly. Like the atmosphere is certainly very cold and like kind of reflecting, I guess, how Vashti feels, which we'll get into, I'm sure, but like she is our point of view character for most of the story. Then at the end, it kind of loses that, which I don't know. I mean, we'll talk about that. It doesn't not work. I do like it. I definitely think for me, the story is a little bit front-ended, like I like the way he ends it, but at the same time, it's like, I don't know, it's, it does feel a little bit inconclusive and preachy, but like the journey to get there is just so, so cool and so ahead of its time.
And really the things he's coming up with, like maybe, you know, maybe you'd see it in some speculations from engineers of the time and stuff like that, but like you just didn't have that kind of stuff, like living in this little isolated chamber, talking to all your friends online and your ideas are basically like you're, you're supposed to be generating ideas, but it's like how memes are today or something like that. It's just like, oh, you don't have any ideas, but then at the same time, like creativity is frowned upon and it's like, but there's all this cool tech and it's like really futuristic and now with all these smart homes and different things that we have nowadays, like we're finally starting to kind of get there. But the fact that he was, he kind of just dreamed up this stuff, like sort of sui generis feeling almost because I don't really think he was reading a lot of gadget fiction or anything like that. I don't know, maybe he was, but yeah, that's certainly the thing that would have impressed me most about the story when I was younger.
Nate:
Yeah, no, it does a really good job with all that, the imagery is pretty incredible, especially for its age. I mean, it really does remind me of stuff that would be published 40, 50 years later and I could easily pass for that. So yeah, definitely highly recommended for me. I mean, this is one of the best things we've done for the podcast, I think, certainly, I don't know, I guess not to spoil it, but my favorite for the, all the stuff we've covered tonight.
JM:
Yeah, it's definitely the best written.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I would agree that this is also my best for this night. It's just, I do agree that I like the first part more than the second part, but I think that it's because like, you can tell that Forster is really good at writing characters and can capture that. And I think we have talked more about the technology aspect, but even like the effects of technology, even if they do feel a little less nuanced than we might expect from other writers, I think he captures it very well, the isolation that can come from the devices that are included in the story.
JM:
So Forster couldn't have anticipated the cause of all this and the fears he has are certainly legitimate, but like, as somebody living in 2023, the thing that popped in my head on reading this was, well, I know what their problem is, they have no engineering team or IT people or anything like that, they can't fix the machine, they just kind of left it to run itself, right? So of course, eventually something's going to happen. And although it has really awesome self repair mechanisms, it's not perfect.
So these are the kind of realities that we live in now, right? And he's almost getting there thinking about how this would work, right? Because a lot of the time, we do have problems like that where nobody knows what the hell to do to fix something, right? So I don't know, Nate, you might have some thoughts about that yourself.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, stuff breaks all the time. And I guess that's one of the points that Butler was trying to make of what happens when you construct a society that's so reliant on this technology, and you lose the knowledge of how to fix the basic stuff, how to build it from the ground up. And he doesn't really get into this kind of detail. In a ways, I almost feel like this story is the novel that Butler didn't give us, you know, getting lost in all of his pontificating and all that. He kind of dropped the whole opportunity for some kind of backstory to the collapse of the use of machines. And I mean, I almost feel like that this story here could be that story, the backstory to "Erewhon" in a way.
But I mean, it does explore some of the same themes of what happens when society is constructed upon a technological base and the makers of that technology and the people who know how to maintain that technology are long dead. So you just have everybody at the mercy and the whims of a huge machine on autopilot.
JM:
Yeah. And the only book you have is more like a Bible than a manual, apparently. So that's not very useful.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It really does feel like carrying out Butler's idea of machines evolving beyond humanity and like how humanity, because it is brought up, obviously, in the story where people are serving the machine instead of vice versa and the religious aspect of it, which we'll get into as we read, as we get into the story.
JM:
Yeah. Do we want to get into it now so we can talk about the nitty gritty details?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Because I think we all agree that it's awesome.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Read this one. This is common to find pretty much everywhere. So yeah. It's short. It's really good.
JM:
This did end up in one of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes. The idea was to, I guess, put all these stories together from before the Nebula Awards, mostly American magazine science fiction. I think these came out in the 70s, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. They have some really good stories in them, mostly, like I said, they're American magazine science fiction, but "The Time Machine" by Wells did it get in there and so did this story. So I guess Wells, definitely I can understand. And this was like, you know, a surprising inclusion that I remember when I first read one of those volumes. I did not actually read this story, like I said, I didn't read it till 2020, but it's definitely highly regarded by the actual science fiction writers as well, who take it as an influence, like you can really see it in a lot of future stuff. But yeah, to me, Huxley was the most obvious, I guess, antecedent with "Brave New World", because it was definitely reticent of that.
(music: robotic gurgling on top of droney synths)
spoiler plot summary, spoiler discussion
"The Machine Stops", begins, "imagine if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the center by its side or reading desk. That is all the furniture. And in the armchair, there sits a swallowed lump of flesh, a woman about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs."
This woman so introduced by the narrator is Vashti, who is alerted by a bell of a call from her son, Kuno, who lives on the other side of the world. After pressing a device called an isolation knob and dimming the lights, she answers the call on a blue plate, to which she can see her son's face.
Kuno requests to meet his mother in person, not through the machine, and catching his disapproval of it, Vashti chastises him for speaking ill of it. He responds that the machine was not made by gods, but by men. When Vashti remarks she has no time to visit, he suggests the airships, which she doesn't like. She gets no ideas in them. Kuno says he gets ideas in them.
JM:
So what do you think their notion of ideas is, is that like some kind of synthesis of ideas that already exists basically makes a new idea, but anything that's like non-traceable is not a real idea?
Nate:
Yeah, it's just so strange the culture that exists in this world is that all knowledge seems to be in such a fragmentary form that's like totally devoid of context and isolated from everything else. She's talking about the lectures and stuff like that, it's on a very weird niche subject that doesn't seem to have a beginning or end to just kind of exist for five minutes in the middle. And there's just everything that is broadcast through media and what these people are absorbed are these like random snippets of contextless information.
JM:
Right. And the people that know their subjects know them very well, but they have no, like you said, there doesn't seem to be any context.
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, it seems to be the stigma against direct experience. Like you can't, it can't be something that applies to their real lives. It has to be something that like they can get through something else that isn't, that isn't practical. It has to be impractical.
JM:
Yeah. It has to be analyzed and chewed up and spit out in a more digestible form.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
So thinking about the real world and getting lost in the poetry of the clouds when you're in an airship and the stars and wondering what's out there. It's just totally beyond her and this line of thinking. Yeah. I guess it does again, call back to the Butler and the College of Unreason. It just seems like a very silly name, but I think one that kind of fits how these people are educated and cultured in their upbringing.
JM:
That was a silly satire though. And this feels like, I don't know, it is, it feels a lot more real. Not just because Vashti is a character, whereas Butler didn't really have any, but...
Gretchen:
Yeah, there's actual people that he writes about and can, it's not just the idea, but actually applying the idea to real characters and like in a plot.
Nate:
Yeah. And it's incredible at how much of a difference that actually makes when you have characters that do things and talk to one another and have feelings versus this kind of...
JM:
Even when it's difficult for them.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
And she certainly, she certainly struggles with this whole journey across the world to an identical chamber situation.
Gretchen:
Yes. He then gets to the main reason he called his desire to visit Earth's surface. He wants Vashti to come with him. While there is no harm in visiting the surface, Vashti explains, there are no advantages either. It is just dust and mud. And without respirators, the outer air could kill them. When she also implies going is against what is expected of them by the machine, Kuno effectively hangs up on her.
After this conversation, Vashti continues to perform her daily routine, lecturing on music and attending lectures in turn, virtually. She does check, though, on the timetable for airships in the only book she and everyone else owns, "The Book of the Machine", which contains all the knowledge she needs on how to operate the apparatus of the machine.
She views it with reverence, and when she finally works up the nerve to see Kuno after he refuses to speak to her further until they meet in person, she clutches it to her as she presses a button that opens her room to the tunnel outside. A car in the tunnel takes her to the airship, where she encounters the first people she's seen face to face in months.
Airships at this point are rarely used, most people preferring to stay in their rooms. There are not many other passengers. It is night when the airship heads to its destination, though the sun begins to rise during the voyage. When Vashti attempts to block the sun with the blinds, they fly open, and the sunlight causes her to panic, and an attendant comes to her and tries to study her, which Vashti is disgusted by. It is custom for people to avoid physical contact.
JM:
It's kind of an interesting encounter that she has with the woman, because at first I was like, because he set up the woman to be kind of a maverick character who was sort of more boisterous and more strong than anybody else, and in the end she's like praising the machine, but you don't know, maybe there's some sarcasm there, maybe not, like I'm kind of wondering if maybe a little bit she's thinking differently, or just like a drone like everybody else kind of thing.
Gretchen:
While passing over the Himalayas, the previously known roof of the world, the attendant and Vashti, assured in humanity's progress since then, repeat to each other how we have advanced thanks to the machine.
After airship voyage, Vashti arrives at Kuno's room, and learns he had gone to the surface without a permit, and now is threatened with the punishment of homelessness. Homelessness means being exiled on the surface, where the exposure to the air results in death. When Vashti is shocked at how Kuno could get to the surface, he tells her that he found his own way out, then begins his story of how he did so. Kuno first began walking up and down the platform outside his room, getting a sense of space, of near and far, which many have lost as they remain in their rooms. He started to wonder, since the underground cities were constructed when people still resided on the surface, if there remained any ventilation shafts for the workers from that time.
He went to the railway tunnels, closer to the surface, and came across one of the openings, returning after strengthening his arms and getting a respirator, Kuno started to climb up a ladder in the shaft. As he climbed, he encountered silence for the first time in his life, away from the machine's hum.
Soon, he came across a stopper that blocked air from the surface. He jumped from the ladder, risking death in the hopes of finding a handle to grab onto, which he did. The stopper was then blown out of the ground, taking Kuno to the surface. able to reach his respirator, Kuno laid on the ground and sipped at the air, coming from the shaft. Eventually, the air filled the hollow of the land he was in, and he could move around the surface. He realized, looking over the land, that the only thing alive underground is the machine, which humans bend their wills to.
He refuses to continue, not wanting to elaborate on what he experienced. But though Vashti is ashamed of him, and distressed by his story, she urges him to explain how he returned to civilization.
So he tells her how by nightfall from the shaft had come a white worm-like creature, the mending apparatus. It wrapped around his legs, and though he struggled against it, other worm-like appendages had emerged as well, and they dragged him and the stopper back under the surface. He then awoke back in his room.
Finished with his tale, he claims he could have lived on the surface, which Vashti considers incredulous. When he tells her of seeing another person on the surface who the worms killed, she believes him mad and leaves.
In the years following, two big changes occur. One is the abolition of respirators preventing people from visiting the surface. Although airships are also proposed by some to be abolished, they do remain, however barely used. The other change is the reemergence of religion, in the form of undenominational Mechanism. Religion begins worshiping the machine, though still in an isolated way. People who are non-believers are punished by homelessness. These changes, while officially declared by the Central Committee, that is in charge of society, were already approved by the majority of the population.
JM:
This is the first we hear of the Central Committee, I think, and they're obviously pretty useless.
Gretchen:
They are briefly mentioned a little bit earlier, and it's still the same thing where their only job seems to be when they condemn people to homelessness, and that's it.
JM:
And the machine seems to act with, like, woefulness, but it might be just, oh, you know, here's one of my human components has to go back in its proper place. I don't know. It's not really suggested anywhere that the machine has consciousness, but, I mean, again, the Butler ones attained it, in a way, so, I don't know, it could be, right, like it could be, it's left ambiguous, which is cool, but at the same time, the fact that he was like these horrible mechanical creatures came out that most people don't normally see and sort of captured him and took him back down, and they actually possibly did more damage as well. There's something that's not really, it's not really fully gone into, but it sounds pretty horrible, which we'll get to, but yeah.
Gretchen:
Eventually, Vashti receives a message from Kuno, where he tells her simply, "the machine stops". She finds this idea absurd and laughs it off, though when she encounters technical issues while trying to play music and the Mending Committee implies they are dealing with similar cases, she starts to worry. After this, people face more and more malfunctions of the machine.
JM:
I like the way he describes the malfunctioning machinery too, it's like, it normally, even in sci-fi movies and shows that are quite recent, right, like if your audio, your computer malfunctions or whatever, the audio usually starts to slow down like a tape just to illustrate that that's what's happening, right, even though, yeah, we know now we're probably not using tapes that that wouldn't happen, but the way he describes it is more like, yeah, there's weird artifacting in the music now because it's like the processor is being used for too much and it's not able to, there's like not the same fidelity, but it's described almost in a digital way, which I think, I thought was cool, there's no way you could have anticipated that, but it's just kind of a neat thing that you wouldn't normally see from something that old.
Nate:
It is a very nice touch.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And she just eventually just accepts it as part of the music, but yes, eventually people are unable to summon their beds when they press the button for it, getting moldy artificial food and finding the air in their rooms to be stale or foul. Eventually though, the final straw comes, communication breaks down. Even as Vashti realizes this and thinks of Kuno's message, she finds it hard to believe. The phrase still conveyed nothing. If eternity was stopping, it would of course be set going shortly. This is not the case though, as she faces silence for the first time in her life and finds it unbearable. In her distress, she opens her room to the tunnel outside and finds it full of people as upset and desperate as she. Unable to withstand seeing so many people, she returns to her room to wait out the end.
She grows desperate, spinning throughout her room as the lights also start to fail, trying all the buttons she can to no use. She then again hits the button that opens out into the tunnel where the people outside are dying and bursts into tears and is answered by tears from Kuno, who finds her through the darkness. He tells her the people who are cast out to the surface who are homeless survive. Vashti responds bitterly that they will foolishly start the machine again, but Kuno assures her that humanity has learned its lesson. It is at this point, as the two touch and talk without the use of the machine, that an airship crashes into the city, and in their last moment, they can see scraps of the untainted sky.
JM:
Yeah, the machine does indeed stop.
Gretchen:
It fulfilled its promise.
Nate:
Pretty awesome ending, I think. The last scene where there's just total panic in the underground city, and the mending apparatus is kind of snaking out with these mechanical worms for both really awesome horror scenes. Combined with the cool science fiction imagery, I mean, it's just astounding at how early this stuff is because, I mean, that's something we would expect from a good story from the 1960s to the 1970s.
Gretchen:
Yes, it's really like even that imagery that last I had to include the phrase the untainted sky. I thought just that last image was also really, really cool and like really quite poignant.
JM:
Yeah, it definitely has that sort of cybernetic dystopia feeling to it that that would be certainly especially common after the 60s, I think, like, you know, I mean, when computers became commonplace for quite some time, although maybe less so now, although it might be coming back now in a different way with artificial intelligence being so much in everybody's minds and stuff. But it's not quite what may what maybe would have been expected, like there's certain elements to it that maybe couldn't have been anticipated because of the corporate controlled society we have to be in right now. But that general idea of like, yeah, the machines are going to, we're going to be so reliant on them, and nobody's actually going to have any skills anymore. And that's a lot and this is going to be really a disaster, right?
Gretchen:
It's like when people were thinking of like Y2K and like everything breaking down.
Nate:
Yeah, right. People having to go back and reprogram stuff in COBOL and FORTRAN languages that were from the 1950s, because for whatever reason, banking software still runs on that stuff.
JM:
Wow.
Nate:
I think it's true even up today, but...
JM:
Because it's too much work to overhaul everything and probably, probably like certain conventions have been put into place now. And one of them that I'm pretty sure is a thing is like, comment all your code, right?
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
So you know, make sure that everything you're doing is explained so people can like, because if they have to reassemble what you're doing or change it or whatever, like they have to be able to do that and that could be for something like circuit, I guess, construction as well, right?
Nate:
Absolutely. Yeah. Well labeled things are very useful, I would say.
JM:
Yeah. Like it's not enough just to have an owner's manual, like you need to go into it. You need to have a few different books of the machines for the levels of users, basically.
Gretchen:
One book of the machine isn't going to cut it.
Nate:
No, I think you would need a whole volume set like an Encyclopedia Britannica or something like that. I mean, especially when the machine is ubiquitous all over society, I mean, these people are living in a totally machine controlled environment where they can't even breathe the outside air. So they need some kind of air purification device and control.
JM:
And the outside air is not that bad. I mean, it might be a little bit toxic, but the atomic bomb hasn't been invented yet. If this story were written a couple of decades later, probably it would be like, oh yeah, we can't go out on the surface because it's really radioactive, this and that. But it turns out, it seems like, yes, it's noxious, but people can get used to it. It's not that bad.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So.
Nate:
But I mean, again, it does kind of play into those later tropes that we would see in doomsday fiction and post apocalyptic nuclear war type stuff.
JM:
Yeah. I'm trying to think there's definitely a lot of these kind of isolation kind of stories about people and they're like, they're so tied to their machines because there's been some kind of apocalyptic event and not really gone into in this story. It just seems like it was a matter of attrition. Like everybody just sort of assumed that the status quo was the right way to go and the machines just became more and more prominent and they didn't really care about the outside air anymore. And presumably it's like factories just dumped pollutants into the air and stuff like that, I guess. And the air inside is all filtered and recycled. So nobody has to worry about it. Right. So.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It is interesting that Forster sort of makes the point or, you know, very much like emphasizes that like the people are the ones that are even more adamant about certain things than the machine is.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
So you can kind of see when we were talking about whether the machine itself is like a malicious force or if they're just deify it for their own purposes and kind of give it a life that it doesn't deserve is raised by Forster throughout the story.
Nate:
Yeah, it certainly adds a religious cult element to it or I guess even more satirizing the priesthood, of people exploiting it for their own power and using it in that way.
Gretchen:
Another sort of parallel to Butler, a kind of religious commentary in it.
JM:
So I wonder how much time has passed since, you know, all this has been going on and the machine has been sort of at the center of all culture. It seems like it's been quite a long time from, from, I don't, I don't think he actually gives a time period, but maybe he mentions like hundreds of years or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, I assume centuries. I don't know if he actually spells it out.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I was thinking because, you know, there's this one moment when they mentioned the French Revolution and like how many generations removed and they mentioned it's like 12 generations or something.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
So it's kind of like, I think there's an implication of how long it is, but I don't remember for sure.
JM:
So just like the, I guess one thing that maybe does bug me a little bit about this story is that the two, like the two things don't really connect together. Like the fact that Kuno is exploring and learning things about the world and the machine stopping, like it does, they just happen to happen at around the same time. And I don't know, I kind of, I guess, I mean, this is a pretty great gem of a story as it is. And I don't know that it necessarily needs to have longer, you know, like be longer, have more content. But I just, you know, there's kind of the things that make me wonder like, well, what are we supposed to infer that Kuno was doing something...
Nate:
That's what I took from it, that he was implicitly sabotaging it off-screen somewhere.
Gretchen:
That's what it felt like to me as well. The fact that, you know, he messaged her with that. The machine stops. It feels very like he was behind it.
JM:
It seems deliberate, but it also seems like he was noticing that before. Like he was just noticing, oh, you know, the motor seemed to have to work harder to do whatever, right? And like, there's something, something is wrong in the apparatus and like, it seemed like it was just something he was noticing rather than speeding along. But maybe by the end, I mean, it is mostly from her perspective, but like even by the ad that mostly goes away.
Nate:
Yeah. But I mean, it could be possible he did something and wouldn't have an idea of what it would do. He could break some circuit box somewhere and he doesn't realize what a cascading effect it might have on other systems. Because I mean, when you live in a world where literally everything is controlled by these mechanical systems, the environment, the physical space you live in, the repair, you know, all that kind of stuff, if one system breaks, it could cascade into some kind of environmental failure where the other systems break down around it.
JM:
Right. So the central committee, I guess they just decide on the decorations or something like that. They don't really have anything important to do.
Gretchen:
They just banish anyone who is a non-believer, like anyone who's, yeah, they just, you know, if they start questioning anything, they just get sent out to the surface.
JM:
Yeah. So it does kind of, I mean, I don't know, I don't know, like the fact that they're called a central committee and the fact that like, we're going to be talking about the Soviet Union story later and the fact that Čapek is going to talk a lot about extreme ideologies.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Kind of does, I mean, this is 1909, so Russian Revolution hasn't happened yet, but I don't know, it does kind of, maybe just because of what I've been reading lately and the associations just kind of make me think like, oh, it's maybe a little bit continental and that, like, maybe a little bit, but I guess not really, it's, but it's just the idea that in the new sort of stereotypically overrun bureaucratic communist society, as described by somebody like Bulgakov, there would be so many like useless middlemen who don't really, you know, who just specialize in one silly thing and are very self-important about it and like in the end, right, there's just, yeah, there's not the skill and the wherewithal to get things done. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Well, it does seem like Forster did have, I mean, his name is sort of the product of like bureaucratic mistakes and it seems like he does have like a sort of interest in that or maybe exploring that aspect, you know, bureaucracy and of course, this would be before it, but later on, he was considered by like communists and like socialists to be like not extreme enough as well, like Čapek, he spoke at this one conference that was like mostly for like leftists and the crowd like booed him because they didn't think his takes were radical enough.
Nate:
I guess not a lot of changes, but yeah, I imagine the British Empire especially had insane bureaucracy around the time that this was written.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
All kinds of centuries old laws and positions that based on kind of heritage and it even seems like a nightmare today, so I can't even imagine how much more complex it was back a hundred years ago. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Not to mention with like the Empire and like colonization, so that yeah, that had to be something Forster was aware of and yeah,
JM:
The twilight of the Empire is at hand.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, he was in India and Egypt for a while.
JM:
So yeah, I was just going to say that definitely hearing about all that made me more curious to read that book. And it sounds like it sounds like overall a quite melancholy experience. So maybe that Gretchen, we were talking about the book and I think you said it was quite a melancholy work. So that does kind of fit.
Gretchen:
Yeah. My first experience was with "Maurice" and I feel like "Maurice" is not as melancholy, but so it was a surprise to read some of his other work and a lot of his other work does seem to have that more melancholic feel to it than when he wrote "Maurice", he specifically wanted it to have a happy ending. But the rest of his work seems to be more concerned with, I think he said that he wanted to write where there's something added to the world by his writing. But if there was going to be something sentimental or happy, it had to be earned.
JM:
Yeah, it certainly got me interested in getting more, more into it and then I guess reading more of his fiction because it seems like, and it's quite at least the early stuff that's like not so obscure that wasn't posthumous is quite well regarded and has there's a lot of adaptations of "Howard's End" and "A Room with a View". And it seems like he's an author I heard about for a really long time. And then, of course, knowing he had this work of seminal science fiction, I had to read that one being the science fiction nerd, I suppose, or just like, yeah, that's the one I'm going to read. But that's so it goes. And that's, it gave me, it gave me a little bit of a window in to get extra excited about it for doing it on the podcast as well. So I don't know. It's cool. Definitely. Yeah, I recommend it too. I think even though I have a little bit of, I don't know, a little bit like, I think, like I was saying earlier, he does get a bit insistent at times about his, like, particular pedantry about the machine and stuff like that. And I don't know, maybe it's just because we've all been exposed to so many dangerous machine stories. It's like, it's, but the way that the story feels ahead of its time, way, like it definitely out, outstrips that aspect of it, I think, and I don't know if humanity really has learned its lesson, but I think I'm happy with Forster's particular idea, nonetheless.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't really have much to say on this. I thought this was great. So definitely recommend it.
Gretchen:
I do as well. And definitely makes me want to read more Forster. I would like to try out like "A Room with a View" or "Howard's End" at some point. But yeah, that's really all I had to say as well.
JM:
All right. So do you think then it's time to move on to a factory tour?
Nate:
Yeah. Let's do it.
JM:
Let's go through some of the factories of Europe or perhaps some remote island somewhere where a very special factory happens to be. In a moment, then we'll bring you some news from the workers.
Bibliography:
Lago, Mary - "Forster on E. M. Forster", Twentieth Century Literature, Summer - Autumn (1985)
Moffat, Wendy - "A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster" (2010)
Rau, Santha Rama - "Remembering E. M. Forster", Grand Street , Summer, 1986, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Summer, 1986)
Stone, Wilfred and Forster, EM - "Some Interviews with E. M. Forster", Twentieth Century Literature , Spring, 1997, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1997)
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