The Machine Stops

Written by E. M. Forster

Narrated by Emma Gregory

The Machine Stops is a groundbreaking sci-fi short story by E.M. Forster. The story is set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs. The book is particularly notable for predicting new technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet.

After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909 the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories. In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SNR Audio
• Release date: Dec 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805364177

E. M. Forster

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist. Born in London to an Anglo-Irish mother and a Welsh father, Forster moved with his mother to Rooks Nest, a country house in rural Hertfordshire, in 1883, following his father’s death from tuberculosis. He received a sizeable inheritance from his great-aunt, which allowed him to pursue his studies and support himself as a professional writer. Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge, from 1897 to 1901, where he met many of the people who would later make up the legendary Bloomsbury Group of such writers and intellectuals as Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. A gay man, Forster lived with his mother for much of his life in Weybridge, Surrey, where he wrote the novels A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times without winning, Forster is now recognized as one of the most important writers of twentieth century English fiction, and is remembered for his unique vision of English life and powerful critique of the inequities of class.

Reviews for The Machine Stops

[E. O'Shea · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An astonishing view into the present, written in the past.