"The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine."

Today's story is "The Machine Stops," by E M Forster. It appeared in the November 1909 issue of "The Oxford and Cambridge Review."

After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (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 popular anthology "Modern Short Stories." In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.

Edward Morgan Forster OM CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author. He is best known for his novels, particularly “A Room with a View” (1908), “Howards End” (1910) and “A Passage to India” (1924). He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, biographies and some plays. Many of his novels examine class differences and hypocrisy.

His short story "The Machine Stops" (1909) is often viewed as the beginning of technological dystopian fiction.

Considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 22 separate years. He declined a knighthood in 1949, though he received the Order of Merit upon his 90th birthday. Forster was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1953, and in 1961 he was one of the first five authors named as a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

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"Mesmerizing Galaxy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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