When one says the word ‘abstinence,’ most of us think about high school sex ed and the concept of not engaging in sexual activity until we’ve reached a certain age, or in some cases, until we’re married. In The Machine Stops, we’re introduced to a new form of abstinence; a world in which individuals avoid any physical contact with each other. In fact on page 9, the narrator mentions that “The custom [of physical contact] had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.” This, undoubtedly raises many questions in the reader. The first being: how do they reproduce? We know that they reproduce for the protagonist herself has multiple children. So are humans artificially inseminated just like we do to cattle and swine? Second: did the people in Forster’s world forego human contact willingly? By that I mean: did they decide that the study of information superseded the basic human necessity for contact with others, or on a darker note, did the Machine decide for them? This is the most intriguing part of the story for me because the science fiction I’ve read didn’t touch on the concept of physical isolation in this way. Especially not willing and accepted isolation. The last point I want to make is a reflection of one of the first statements made in the story. On the first page, the narrator says that Vashti knows “several thousand people…human intercourse had advanced enormously.” But what does it mean that she has several thousand friends, yet is incapable of a romantic relationship, of falling in love? This, in some ways, is comparable to the person in our lifetime who has 5,000 friends on Facebook or a couple thousand followers on Instagram but only personally knows maybe a third of them. Aside from predicting quite accurately the types of technology that we would be using in the future, Forster also tackles the issues that we would inevitably face once bestowed with these tools.