As is my custom, I dedicate a few days each Spring Break to recommending and reviewing various short stories. Typically, I read through an anthology of short stories over break and highlight three or four of the best stories from them.
However, I neglected to take an anthology with me when I left town for Easter weekend, and I didn’t have the time to pluck one from my parents’ substantial library. So, I’m doing a one-off today (and possibly for other Spring Break Shorty Story Recommendation 2022 installments this week), although I am sure this story has appeared in many anthologies.
The story is E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” which I wrote about in brief in another post in April 2020, during the early days of The Age of The Virus. The Z Man wrote about it in one of his posts from the time, which intrigued me enough to read the story.
It is, I believe, one of the great works of prophetic science fiction. There’s a great deal of that from the mid-twentieth century; Forster was predicting things like FaceTime and social media in 1909.
The Portly Politico 