Welcome to the Machine: The Humanism of “The Machine Stops” E. M. Forster opens his short story “The Machine Stops” with a verb in the imperative mood: “Imagine” (2). The word informs the reader that this short story is a work of speculative fiction, telling the reader to “[i]magine [...] a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of bee”, a room where “[t]here were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food or music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button [...] the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which [one] communicated with [one’s] friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that [one] cared for in the world” (Forster …show more content…
The conflict in their relationship is immediately apparent: it is Kuno who reminds his mother that “‘[m]en made [the Machine], do not forget that’” (4). Whereas Vashti serves as a representation of the overall societal attitude in the story towards the Machine, her son Kuno represents a diametrically opposed view of nature and philosophy. He tells his mother that he wants “‘to see [the] stars again [...] [he] want[s] to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as [their] ancestors did, thousands of years ago’” (6). Here, Kuno explains to his mother his desire to see the world from a more primitive state: he doesn’t want to see it “from the air-ship”—which makes travel across the earth feasible—but to see it as “[his] ancestors did”, reflecting a view of nature and society mirroring Romanticism, or Transcendentalism. The son’s desire to find inspiration through nature, in attaching himself with the idea of an “ancestor” almost recall passages from Thoreau’s Walden: “[e]very morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (64). The desire of Kuno’s to see the stars as his ancestors saw them reflects a desire to attain that same “innocence” and cohesion “with Nature