Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Machine Stops
    The Machine Stops
    The Machine Stops
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Machine Stops

    Written by E. M. Forster

    Narrated by Jerome Lawsen

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    The Machine Stops is a science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and are threatened with "Homelessness". Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthor's Republic
    Release dateDec 23, 2016
    ISBN9781518939464
    Author

    E. M. Forster

    E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist. Born in London to an Anglo-Irish mother and a Welsh father, Forster moved with his mother to Rooks Nest, a country house in rural Hertfordshire, in 1883, following his father’s death from tuberculosis. He received a sizeable inheritance from his great-aunt, which allowed him to pursue his studies and support himself as a professional writer. Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge, from 1897 to 1901, where he met many of the people who would later make up the legendary Bloomsbury Group of such writers and intellectuals as Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. A gay man, Forster lived with his mother for much of his life in Weybridge, Surrey, where he wrote the novels A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times without winning, Forster is now recognized as one of the most important writers of twentieth century English fiction, and is remembered for his unique vision of English life and powerful critique of the inequities of class.

    More audiobooks from E. M. Forster

    Related to The Machine Stops

    Related audiobooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Seven Books I’ll Never Read

      Aug 7, 2018

      Seven Books I’ll Never Read
      6 min read

    • Article

      The 40 Greatest Books To Read Before You Die

      Apr 25, 2021

      Books, books, books. They will increase your lifespan, lower your stress and boost your intelligence. They will give you fuller, thicker hair. Whatever the breathless claims about reading, one thing is certain: losing yourself in a great novel is one

      14 min read

    • Article

      In Summary

      Jul 1, 2021

      There’s some good writing here. This short extract has covered a lot of ground and established that Edwina is a recently widowed woman thanks to the sinking of the Titanic. Her interior voice is skilfully rendered and there are some subtle touches su

      1 min read

    • Article

      Here Come The Smart Machines

      Jul 1, 2023

      Here Come The Smart Machines
      2 min read

    • Article

      Only Disconnect! A Pandemic Reading of E.M. Forster

      Mar 26, 2020

      Chances are, you’re hunkered down at home right now, as I am, worried about COVID-19 and coping by means of Instacart deliveries, Zoom chats, and Netflix movies, while avoiding others and the outside world. As shown by the experience in China1 and re

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Matrix at 20

      Aug 8, 2018

      Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the sci-fi movie classic "The Matrix," which depicts powerful machines attempting to subdue the human race. Sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes it's the other way around. On occasion, art can be propheti

      2 min read

    • Article

      ‘Frankenstein’ And The Science Of Transitioning

      Apr 25, 2018

      Victor Frankenstein stands listening to his creation, the creature who he brought to life from the sewed-together remnants of the dead, who he abandoned at the height of his success, and who now asks his father to remedy his rejection buy building hi

      6 min read

    • Article

      The End Is Only the Beginning

      Dec 1, 2022

      The End Is Only the Beginning
      14 min read

    • Article

      Nature

      Jun 19, 2023

      In an article published last year in the Scientific American, contemplating developments in our search for extraterrestrial life, Andrea Gawrylewski writes, “Given the math, it seems impossible that we humans would be the only living things in the co

      3 min read

    • Article

      Praying for the Moths and Beetles

      Oct 26, 2017

      ". . . insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them." And instantly I'm beyond the realm of anything I know, as I consider the gradual disappearance not of whales but o

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

      Oct 2, 2014

      I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel roo

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Final Countdown

      Apr 1, 2024

      by Stuart Turton (Raven Books, $34.99) There are 125 people at the end of the world, and one of them is dead. In the more dystopian apocalyptic narratives, that loss might be primarily one of capacity: losing the only remaining doctor, or the one p

      2 min read

    • Article

      Feeding the Future: On the Algorithmic Apocalypse

      Mar 22, 2018

      Science fiction often presents two nightmare visions of the future: one when the world has ended, and one when the world hasn’t, where “progress”—technological, typically—determinedly continues, for better but mostly worse. Whichever you find least f

      7 min read

    • Article

      End Of The World Is NAI

      Jun 3, 2023

      WARNING: this week moves from on the couch to on the soapbox because sometimes a little curiosity leads you down a long, dark hole. Having floundered through yet another week despairing for humanity, contemplating world government, commerce, 2024 ele

      2 min read

    • Article

      Bodies of Knowledge

      Aug 27, 2021

      Bodies of Knowledge
      19 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Machine Stops

    4/5

    74 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      Very boring. Narrator reads so very slowly, even with speed boost. It's a story about isolation and a broken relationship. Nothing interesting happen in the book. Skip it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Amazing that this was written so long ago and so much has come true. Let us hear the warning not to worship the manmade and build wisely.
    • 5/5
      Not entirely sure how this can be reviewed so poorly by previous person. Considering when this was written, it's a masterpiece.
    • 5/5
      A prescient author is this Forster. Incredibly accurate description of lockdown life in 2020.
    • 1/5
      The story is fine, but this reading is horrid. Random pauses (like William Shatner) and an overall slow reading make it hard to listen to.