Vashti revisited

I began my inaugural blog on this website On becoming Vashti as follows: My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.

A recent comment on this posting by a former student, June Gibbons, has prompted a further re-reading of The Machine Stops. With each re-reading Forster becomes more prescient. When I wrote my inaugural blog I had not anticipated the sub-prime-credit-crunch. But Forster had:

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.

A better description of our current mess I have yet to find. The efficiency of the mechanism for creating and disseminating toxic derivatives was impressive. Understanding of the devastation they would spread was absent. Those master brains in whom we all wanted to believe because they were making us richer, did not perish. They never existed. They were, with beguiling gravitas, blowing a bubble; no one confessed the Machine was out of hand.

As a guide to the past, and present, and possibly the future, I cannot recommend Then Machine Stops too highly.