The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 5 August 2008
by E. M. Forster
In this small collection of short stories, there are some gems from Forster's career before World War 1, which makes most of them nearly a century old. This is most notable in the opening story of the collection, The Machine Stops, which was published in 1909. This science-fiction tale presages many of our modern obsessions and angst about our disconnectedness from immediate experience. The entire planet's population lives below ground, in tiny cells, connected via a vast machine network, with constant input from telephones, screens, speakers and keyboards. Forster was, no doubt, responding to conditions in his time, but it is fascinating to see echoes of the modern obsession with communications via computers, cell phones, television, the Internet. (Is life aboard the Axiom in the movie Wall-E a coincidence or derivative of Forster's story?) One man chooses to escape this world, to go live on the surface (remeniscent of THX-1138), but the Machine is determined to stop him. In the end, who do you think will win? The story is perhaps too short to contain its potentially sprawling themes, and seems somewhat incomplete as a result. Yet it is a compelling artefact and clearly has many admirers in the century since its publication. In the interim in this volume, there are included four very short stories, each with a satiric mystical bent. We travel to hell with one character, to heaven with another, meet a siren with a third, and visit with Napoleon and Beethoven resting on heavenly clouds as they keep track of their legacies. Finally, the sixth story The Eternal Moment is the finest in the collection and reflects more on Forster's work in novels. It is the story of a Miss Raby, an author whose debut novel highlighted life in a small European village. When she returns decades later and with a gentleman companion (which, in its time, is enough to turn heads), she discovers the village transformed by the fame of her book. It is overrun by tourists who have transformed the village in their image, despite the fact that they supposedly seek there the transformative experience of small village life. This story, too, echoes down through the century. How many of us have experienced a place spoiled by tourism and fame after appearing in some popular book or movie? It is the nature of our culture, it seems, to overwhelm the quaint coziness we seem to so desire. And Forster tells us this is not a new phenomenon by any means. This is the best story in this curious small collection. Forster demonstrates his ability to see far into the future, merely by sharply perceiving man's proclivities in his own time.