Author: Yi Shan

https://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ys3041/week1/Aboutme.html

       The Machine Stops is a science fiction about the future world. It is an extreme industrialized world that people rely too much on the machine in their whole life. Vashti always stays at her home, and she is afraid of reaching the ground and communicate with other people face to face. In this world, there is a huge amount people like Vashti. Most people adore the machine and trust everything on the book of the machine. In other words, they are controlled by the machine. However, one day the machine suddenly stops. The countries collapse and people are going to die.

       Although the novel is written in 1909, it still have ironic meanings in nowadays society. I have to admit that the smartphone is an indispensable thing in my daily life. And social software is also very important for me to communicate with others. I can use them to communicate with my parents, friends and even strangers without going out of my room. The smartphone and the internet are like the machine in the novel.  We can talk to other on video like how Vashti talks to her son Kuno in the novel.

      In the novel, Vashti communicates with her son only by the machine. Only when Kuno says that he will not talk to Vashti unless Vashti comes does Vashti go out of her home. In our society, we also have a similar phenomenon that we may now rely too much on the internet and ignore the people around us. So that let me think about a lot of questions. What if one day the internet crashed such as the stopped machine? Do we have other methods to communicate with each other instead of the internet?