A Love-Hate Relationship with Science Fiction
By Aaron Klein
In my last post, I raved about how much the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode we watched calmed me down during the unyielding moment of crisis that is 2020. This week, our two class sources that I was most invested in were The Circle by Dave Eggers and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, and they definitely have not eased my anxiety. I have a love-hate relationship with fiction like these. Let me explain why. In stressful times like ours, with a pandemic and a historic election happening in parallel, we just want to escape. But alas, we are also stuck inside and relegated to being in front of our screens all day. We want to gather as much information as possible when we feel cut-off from a world in crisis, and the implements to do it are enticingly accessible. So, these two competing desires in our lives pervade the books we read as well. The avid readers I know are conflicted about whether the books you read right now should be for escapism or for the purpose of learning about and gaining perspective on our current world. An example would be deciding to read a magical fantasy novel where good clearly and justly wins over evil or deciding to read books about the history of the plagues or a fictional fight for racial justice. These sorts of choices are largely dependent on personality; my personality, unfortunately, enjoys both right now.
My internal conflict with The Circle and with The Machine Stops is that they enthrall me because of their relevancy and simultaneously produce a resounding unease and anxiety within me. Those feelings seem to resonate with each other, and there have only been a handful of books that recreate those contradictory feelings inside me, such as The Things They Carried. I have not yet finished The Circle, so I will not focus on it in this post. I will, however, talk about The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.
The Machine Stops was so unsettling that it broke me for the rest of the day. Vashti, the main character, lives out her days only in her room, having every need provided to her by the Machine. The Machine is the all-encompassing system that can take care of every human’s desire and need. The humans regard it as their pinnacle achievement. Ultimately, we create technology to solve our problems and to make living comfortable and pleasant, so a society that has achieved this would have reached the “end of technology.” What is so unsettling is how this achievement fundamentally reshapes what is ‘civilized’ human life. Just as the story shows, the inhabitants of the Machine are actually degrading due to their dependence. Vashti’s normal life is waking up, sharing ideas (aka communicating with friends), listening to lectures, and going to sleep. That is it. You can move about the world via airships, or go to the surface world on predetermined walkways, but that is the entire variety. People have adapted by becoming afraid of discomfort, afraid of direct human contact, mindlessly share pointless ideas without applying any original thought, and only find pleasure in new information. Their lives and extreme behaviors mirror our quarantined lives perfectly. Working on online school during a time with barely any routine and only communicating with my friends through my devices feels emotionally stunting, and I personally feel like I am degrading. This discussion post honestly feels like I am sharing pointless, second-hand ideas. Did anyone relate to this on the same level I did?