This acceptence of extreme social distancing practices could be better viewed as ‘autonomous containment.’Like her fellow secluded citizens, Vashti is not a prisoner per se. Most, like Vashti, the story’s protagonist, are content with their small mechanical environments, surrounded by speaking tubes and electric buttons that call for food, music, hot or cold baths, medicine, and clothing whenever they desire. Not that this posthuman arrangement seems particularly distressing to these future humans.
The remaining human population lives below ground in individual isolated hexagon rooms-shaped like “the cell of a bee” -where their physical, social, and emotional needs are managed by an omnipotent Machine. Forster’s shocking visionary tale “The Machine Stops.” The story is set on a future Earth, the biosphere of which has been rendered uninhabitable as a result of some undisclosed catastrophe. One of the first texts I had assigned for my 2020 spring environmental literarture course, Climate Emergencies, was E.M.
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