Just finished E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops and I keep thinking about it. Written in 1909, it describes a world where people live in isolated cells, communicate entirely through screens, and get anxious when they have to meet in person. He basically predicted video calls, social media outrage cycles, and our discomfort with “unmediated” contact - 115 years early.
What got me is that the horror isn’t the machine. It’s that everyone is comfortable. They complain about the system and then choose it anyway because direct experience is exhausting. That’s a very different dystopia engine than the usual “evil government forces compliance” model.
I’m drafting my own dystopian novella right now (about how people adapt to a system that’s horrifying for exactly one hour a day), and Forster’s version is the one that keeps me up at night - comfort as the cage, not terror.
Has anyone else read it recently? And does it land differently now than it would have twenty years ago, or am I just projecting?