![]() ![]() The fancy runs to 56 pages or so and can be read and digested in a couple of hours. The note of sly suggestion, ‘if you can’, is followed up with another authorial caveat: ‘at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds.’ ‘Meditation’, ‘if you can’, ‘imagine’: we already plunged into a world of fancy. ‘Imagine, if you can,’ he begins, ‘a small room, hexagonal in shape like the cell of a bee’. The critic Alan Wilde wrote in 1965 that the story is ‘too schematic, too fanciful (rather than fantastic), too didactic’.Īnd yet, if the story is ‘too fanciful’, Forster makes no effort to disguise it. It is ‘an Orwellian reaction to a Wellsian future with a curiously Kiplingesque ending’ (not to worry that Orwell was born in 1903, of course). Gransden commented that The Machine Stops was ‘the longest and most tedious of the stories’. It was mostly ignored for much of the twentieth century, or treated as a youthful folly, inferior to Forster’s early novels and even to his other short stories. ![]() Forster’s only science fiction-style short story, The Machine Stops, first published in 1909 in the Oxford and Cambridge Review, has had a rather quixotic critical afterlife. ![]()
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