The CD of Penetration’s 2015 album, Resolution, opens with a cacophony of sound: Chugging bass, soaring guitars, pounding drums, over which Pauline Murray intones a section from EM Forster’s The Machine Stops.
Although The Machine Stops was first published in 1909, and Resolution was released in 2015, I had cause to think of The Machine Stops in 2020 when lockdown happened. As society became more home and internet bound, it felt as though all Forster’s predictions about the future were coming true at once.
In The Machine Stops humanity lives in isolated underground cells, not meeting anyone, not going outside, communicating with others only through The Machine. I mean, unless you were a key worker and had to go out, that was lockdown in a nutshell, wasn’t it?
For a brief period between the end of April 2020 and the middle of May, I had a temp job in Adult Social Care at a nearby hospital. The thing I remember most about it was the journey on the almost empty bus where I saw the same two people every day, both of whom were also working at the hospital.
I remember the silence.
I remember how empty Oxford Road was, and that someone skateboarded down it.
There is a fine line between nihilism and full blown dystopia but the nihilism of punk did lean on the door to dystopia, and artists such as Penetration did often use dystopian language and ideas when creating their music. ‘Silent Community’ from their first album, Moving Targets, has a dystopian feel to it, suggesting a sinister future, but in reality Pauline Murray’s memoir suggests it had its roots more in real life 1970s Ferry Hill than in anything else.
Similarly, it is possible to find the odd bit of dystopian fiction in punk fanzines from the 1970s onwards, and the birth of cyberpunk seems an inevitable collision between two ways of thinking, leading to everything from Blade Runner to Victoriocity.
There are definitely dystopian texts out there that owe something, or a lot, to punk - whether in the form of stylistics, or visual codes, or in overall tone - but there are also texts, like Forster’s, that have directly informed punk in some way, shape or form.
It adds an extra layer to punk, an extra level of enjoyment if you like, an extra door of perception to step through.
EM Forster’s The Machine Stops was originally published in 1909. It was first published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review, before later being published in 1928 as part of Forster’s story collection The Eternal Moment and Other Stories.
The story begins with Vashti, a lecturer of sorts, being contacted through The Machine by her son, Kuno. He wants to speak to her face to face, not through The Machine. A request that Vashti finds horrifying.
She does eventually make the journey to see him face to face, and he confesses a series of adventures that she finds both extraordinary and blasphemous. He has been outside of the world controlled by The Machine, and has found it beautiful.
The nature of Forster’s dystopian world is revealed gradually, and subtly, through a third person narrator who seems to have observed at a remove but who does give out the odd explanatory aside, making the tone shift and feel slightly less formal at points.
The technology described is at once familiar and unfamiliar: Vashti speaks to Kuno through what would be recognisable as video conferencing software today. She lives in a small confined space that would be recognisable as a smart home. She is happy, in her way, until things begin to stop working properly. The machine stutters at first then, at the stories climax, it stops altogether.
Written as it was in 1909, the story has some thematic similarities to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which had been published in 1895. I would say that the world depicted in The Machine Stops is more thoroughly realised than that of The Time Machine, the narrative is more sophisticated and complex, and the implications of the kind of world it depicts are more thought out. The Machine Stops also looks forward (mainly in its descriptions of mechanised pleasure at a sophisticated level) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was first published in 1932. Like those two books, The Machine Stops operates as a warning, a vision of an at times beguiling and attractive but ultimately dysfunctional and dystopian future.
It’s not a warning we have heeded yet, but its message still holds, over 100 years later.
