As I read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, I was shocked at the ignorance and conformity people looked for in the universe created by Forster. Since I have just read science fictions such as The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and I have just watched the film The Wandering Earth, I have encountered many descriptions about the underground cities which people would be living in the future when supposedly the surface of the Earth is no longer livable for human beings. These descriptions of underground cities are very similar in characteristics, and there are two which I want to talk about. First of all, these cities all are limiting to people going up to the surface, especially in The Machine Stops when it is totally forbidden. People wear masks or respirators when they go up to the surface because people could not breathe the air, whether true in the case of The Wandering Earth and The Three Body Problem or told by the Book in The Machine Stops. The second similar characteristic in imagining the future underground cities is the artificial space and lighting and comfort created by either the people in the United Earth Government or the Machine. There seems to always be hope in the future even when human beings cannot live where they have always lived.
Then I saw the cruelness of all three pieces and especially The Machine Stops. In the other two pieces I read and watched on my own, people are hopeful and successful until the end. However, in The Machine Stops, I want to return to what I said at the beginning of this response, they were ignorant and self-interested. They are living in a huge bubble created by the Machine and they are never doubting the ways they are living because they are the generations born into this kind of space and living this kind of life. Just like what Kuno said in the work, human beings have lost their sense of sharp thinking and criticism to ignorance and conformity. Throughout the short story, the author repeats phrases like it was told to these people so they follow it. They were all looking for ideas but they never found one interesting idea which is original. I suppose that the Machine was built by some intelligent people who have original ideas, but when I read that they have already died and passed down the books to later generations, I thought the world must be ending fast because people would want to take control of the Machine so they could be more powerful. And this process would then remind me of 1984. However, when I read that the people only learned by parts the entire control system to the Machine, I realized that these people are less intelligent than I think. The reason why I thought that is because when these people are also living in a world where there is only comfort and convenience and they think every other method are stupid when they are not inventing or thinking or believing, they are going to fail at the smallest tasks. In the end, the people who made the Machine and the Book and the underground cities were the thinkers and the inventors, and the next generations after who would only copy and paste the Founding Fathers without new innovations would only be duller and duller in their ways of life.