Best known for his novels — A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howard’s End — Forster had a keen eye for concrete particularity and individual character. These are qualities largely absent in the colorless world of The Machine Stops. The story is set in the distant future, when human beings have retreated from the Sun, the source of light and life that shines upon the surface of the Earth. Isolated, alone, and terrifically self-involved, they live in underground hexagonal cells, where all their needs are met by something called the “Machine”. Contact with others is almost exclusively electronically mediated. Vashti, the only named character in the story besides her son, Kuno, “knew” several thousand people she’d never met in the flesh, e-friends who could be seen and spoken with on something like Zoom. Vashti is surrounded by buttons “to call for food, for music, for clothing” — even for Machine-made literature and poetry, the equivalent of today’s AI-generated pap. She has no need or desire ever to leave her room.

Forster grasps that a life so dependent on technology would be one of comprehensive decay. A “swaddled lump of flesh” with “a face as white as fungus”, Vashti lacks teeth and hair, organs that have little use in a predigested, temperature-controlled world. Perpetually sedentary, she walks with great difficulty, is highly irritable (“a growing quality in that accelerated age”), and — like everyone else in the great subterranean hive — can no longer hazard the Earth’s surface without a respirator. Leaving her room for the first time in years, she is initially “seized with the terrors of direct experience” and retreats to her armchair. And when a woman later “barbarically” puts out her hand to keep her from falling, she becomes irate, for “people never touched one another”.

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Culture, too, is marked by decadence. It no longer renews itself through immediate openness to the world, a necessary stimulant of intellectual imagination. Like algorithmic chatbots, or Hollywood producers making endless iterations of a past blockbuster, it instead feeds on the creations of bygone epochs. Vashti spends her time listening to lectures on topics like music during “the Australian Period” or “the pre-Mongolian epoch”. She and her intellectual circle long for new “ideas”, demand for which far exceeds supply. Unfortunately, the riches of the past stimulate few ideas in the abstract age of the Machine, when strong individual personality is considered a “taint”, and when feckless intellectuals, to echo Nietzsche, stand like eunuchs before the “great historical world-harem”. “First-hand ideas” acquired by direct observation are thought to be of little value, for they are disturbed by love, fear, and other passions.

The most trustworthy ideas, in Forster’s world, are “tenth-hand”, arrived at by a sequence of intermediary historians counteracting previous interpretations. Yet the result is a flat and narrow presentism masquerading as science. To study the French Revolution in this way, it goes without saying, is to purge it of the powerful passions of its participants and contemporaries — to see it “as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine”. History done thus levels understanding rather than expanding it. It no longer connects people to other times and places, rooting them in a cherished past and offering models of excellence to which they may aspire. Rather, it merely generates counterfactuals that reflect the predominant assumptions of the present.

And if this is a prophecy of the withered historical sense of our time, you might say the same of technology. The Machine is no longer developed in new directions, but merely mended as needed. Travel has ceased to generate ideas, “for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over”. Though there are airships on which people are occasionally compelled to travel for official purposes, like the propagation of the race, the sight of the earth below and the heavens above conveys no new ideas. One is reminded, here, of the disappointment of the internet, where great expectations of cultural cross-pollination are drowned in a flood of pornography and echo-chambered rage.

Instincts of veneration and familial attachment do persist even in this deracinated era. The only printed volume in Vashti’s room is the richly bound Book of the Machine, published by the Central Committee (the functions of government are evidently performed by worldwide bureaucratic and technocratic organs that are supposed to keep the Machine in working order). This Book is but a shadow of the one it has replaced: while the ancient Bible taught how to live free and responsible lives, this one contains “instructions against every possible contingency” — a comprehensive list of buttons to press should one be “hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word”. Human agency is thus made to assume the binary form — on/off, 1/0, thumbs up/thumbs down — that is alone comprehensible to the Machine. Yet when she is troubled, Vashti caresses the volume, which she ritualistically kisses while uttering “O Machine!” Even so, the Book’s comforts are limited; late in life, she asks several times to be euthanized, an expedient at least as popular in her time as it is in ours. In the end, Vashti’s requests are denied: too many people want the same thing, and the number of deaths cannot exceed the number of births.

Into this tragic, broken world steps Kuno, who lives in another hemisphere but wants to see his mother in person and “not through the wearisome Machine”. In his longing for direct experience — for connection with the natural world, historical lands and peoples, and the whole of things; in brief, for a human home lost centuries ago — Kuno defies the spirit of the age. He speaks to Vashti about some stars he saw from an airship, in which he discerned the figure of a man with a sword. He wants to see the stars from the surface of the Earth, “as our ancestors did thousands of years ago”. Vashti at first refuses to visit him, but maternal attachment — and, perhaps, curiosity about his statement that “any moment, something tremendous may happen” — ultimately convinces her that she must.

When Vashti arrives after a miserable flight, Kuno tells her that he’s been threatened with “Homelessness”: death by expulsion through a “vomitory” onto the surface of the Earth. For the tremendous thing had happened: he’d found “a way of my own” to the sunlit uplands of the world, and his crime, going outside without a permit, had been discovered. His preparation for that upward journey had been an education in its own right. He’d never thought of space as anything but an empty container of things, but in walking to build up his stamina, he began to recover a sense of human place. “Man is the measure,” he tells Vashti. “Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”

When he finally climbs to the surface through a hole in a railway tunnel, his ears are pierced by silence. Only now does he realize that the Machine hums with a hum that “penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts”. In the silence, Kuno hears the call of “all the generations who had lived in the open air”; the spirits of the dead comfort him, just as he “was comforting the unborn”. Forced to breathe the painful new air because he has lost his respirator, he climbs a slope and sees sleeping hills that “commune with humanity in dreams” — “the hills of Wessex as Ælfred saw them when he overthrew the Danes”.

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Kuno passionately explains to a weary Vashti what else he now sees. The Machine has “robbed us of the sense of space and the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal relation, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it”. This talk shocks her. But when he tells her that the flexible mechanical arms of the “Mending Apparatus” came from the shaft to drag him back down, and that a woman of the surface ran to his aid and was killed, she thinks him mad as well as blasphemous — no higher forms of life were thought to exist above ground. Then she leaves. Mother and son don’t speak for years, even after he is transferred to a cell near her own.

The rest of the story describes the suffering by which Vashti learns Kuno’s truth. Having stripped us of humanity and made us its slaves, the Machine finally breaks down, at first slowly, then suddenly. For at some point, no one alive understands “the monster as a whole” well enough to repair it — a distinctly modern fatality of which the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset warned in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), and one that may already have befallen us with respect to AI. Murky bathwater, distorted music, and unrhyming poetry are excused, but when beds fail to appear from the cell floors, the air grows foul, and euthanasia is no longer available, the situation becomes grave.

Finally, communications systems fail, a terrifying silence nearly kills Vashti (“it did kill many thousands of people outright”), the walls crack, the floor heaves, and all is plunged into primeval darkness. The desperate moment of reversal and recognition is at hand. Vashti encounters Kuno in the passage outside their rooms, and they weep for humanity, and for mankind’s sins against body and soul. Yet before they die in each other’s arms, touching, talking, and kissing, their minds and hearts are opened to what was important on Earth. And the existence of people on the surface  — men and women Kuno has seen, spoken to, and loved, who are “hiding in the mist and ferns until our civilization stops” — gives them some hope that human culture may once again take root beneath the stars.

Huxley and Orwell give their readers no such hope: the rebellious individuals of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are crushed beneath the ineluctable weight of totalitarianism. But like Forster, Zamyatin and Bradbury leave us with the consolation that humanity can never be completely extinguished — that even, in the most terrible tyrannies, it survives in a few independent souls, and that all regimes must inevitably collapse. We ends in a civil war started by rebels who’ve made contact, as Kuno has, with people living in the wild lands beyond the walls of the One State; in Fahrenheit 451, seeds of a post-apocalyptic civilization are contained in the minds of survivors who’ve memorized great books. Our own fate is still undecided, but there is some reason for optimism. For as Forster reminds us, it is still possible to hear our ancestors’ human voices, there beneath the drone of the Machine.

Which might make what I’m about to argue seem perverse, but here goes. Ballard possessed no supernatural gift of foresight. He was an exceptional writer — one of the greatest of the 20th century — and the possessor of both a powerful imagination and a rare intellectual courage. Most pertinently, he was an extremely acute cultural analyst and observer. He was not a fortune teller. No science-fiction writer is. He was something much more powerful: a diagnostician.

The very idea of prediction is a consoling notion we use to make sense of the terrifying randomness of life and the singular direction in which time’s arrow flies. The notion that science fiction can defy these brute facts of thermodynamics is thrilling: if only we can unearth the correct tracts, we will know what will come to pass. E.M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” is an early example often claimed for the futurological argument. It seems uncanny that, as early as 1909, the author who would become famous for his novels A Room with a View and Howard’s End predicted a world in which, due to some form of environmental disaster, humans communicate trans-globally via screens. How did he know? What had he seen?

What he had seen — and experienced — was the telephone, which was proliferating through the more sophisticated houses of London in the Edwardian period, in which Forster hung out, and which allowed people to talk to each other without leaving their homes. He’d also read H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, and, with some justification, was critical of its promotion of an oligarchic, technocratic society. So, he wrote a story that depicted an automated society in collapse. In short, Forster’s “vision” was responsive to material and literary conditions at the time he was writing: all writers are embedded in their present, regardless of which direction they orient their imaginations.

Ballard, like Forster, regretted the reach of Wells into techno-utopia, declaring: “Great writer though he was, I’m convinced that H.G. Wells has had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction.” He complained that Wells had provided “a repertory of ideas that have virtually monopolised the medium”. Indeed, in Wells, we find a stock of immensely influential science-fictional concepts — most of which no one would describe as prescient. There was much speculation about life on Mars in Wells’s time: Giovanni Schiaparelli’s drawings of the red planet, and descriptions of “canali”, mistranslated as “canals”, had led to newspaper front pages claiming to have identified traces of civilisation. Wells had responded to these imaginatively in The War of the Worlds. As Forster did, Wells was extrapolating from concepts current in the scientific discourse of his day. But hus speculative imaginings enjoyed rich lives in fiction, not reality. Time travel remains physically impossible, and there is no life on Mars. Science fiction is certainly a generative form, but its ideas most frequently generate more science fiction.

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One qualification, perhaps: we should not think of science-fiction writers possessing supernatural foresight, but they can be directly influential on the present-day developments that shape our futures. Elon Musk cites Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as an influence on his intellectual development: “It’s sort of a futuristic version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Let’s say you were at the peak of the Roman empire, what would you do, what action could you take, to minimise decline?”

Jeff Bezos, meanwhile. not only reads and watches science fiction but also hangs out with canonical cyberpunks and follows their advice. As James Davenport, who spent time with Bezos recorded: “[Jeff] says to Neal Stephenson, ‘I’ve always wanted to start a rocket company, that’s always been my dream.’ And Neal Stephenson just said, ‘Do it. Do it today.’ And soon thereafter, he did.”

Two researchers at the University of Cambridge, Sarah Dillon and Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard, recently interviewed 20 leading AI researchers about their reading habits. The results were fascinating. One interviewee “noted that William Gibson’s Neuromancer fed into his team’s research when it was published. Whilst it did not give them their research ideas, ‘it did make us think a bit about what would be a cooler interface’”. Another “talked about finding inspiration for his AI research in two books in particular, which he described as ‘the foundations of my AI-related reading’: Ursula Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) and Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad (1965).” If science fiction is not in the business of predicting the future, then, it can claim to directly influence it.

It’s heartening to think that the anarchist Ursula Le Guin might be shaping what products we end up interfacing with, and we’d all do well to read more William Gibson, who has the awareness of the cyberpunk: he understands that the real future cannot be nearly as slick as the one so often depicted by science fiction. His story, “The Gernsback Continuum”, shows the leaking of the streamlined, imagined rocket-ship futures of the science-fictional jet age into the grimy real world; he once wrote: “The capital F future isn’t going to arise.”

Ballard, too, was always dismissive of that rocket-ship version of science fiction. He was, on occasion, invited to speculate on the future: twice by Vogue in the late Seventies. On the first occasion, he imagined the dream house of the year 2000, in which “Mrs Tomorrow will find herself living happily inside her own head. Walls, floors and ceilings will be huge, unbroken screens on which will be projected a continuous sound and visual display of her pulse and respiration, her brain-waves and blood pressure.”

It’s a brilliant piece of writing, and there’s little doubt that Ballard identified key directions of travel: our attachment to mediating and recording our own lives through technology; the solipsistic privileging of our own emotions within such environments; and the voyeuristic desire to watch others. But he’s clear that he’s working from what’s happening at the time of writing: “However fanciful all this may seem, this transformation of our private lives with the aid of video-systems and domestic computers is already at hand. Micro-computers are now being installed in thousands of American homes, where they provide video-games and do simple household accounts.”

In the second Vogue piece, imagining life in O’Neill space stations, Ballard went route one:

“Will we ever discover alien life in outer space? The answer, almost certainly, is: Yes — in the year 2022. It will be 35 years old, female, come from Pasadena, Dusseldorf or Yokohama, be married to an astrophysicist, adore Doris Lessing and David Hockney, and live in a six-mile-long metal cylinder halfway between our own planet and the Moon.”

We can judge this one pretty clearly, being just the other side of 2022: Nope, didn’t turn out that way. Not that we should ever read Ballard literally, but instead note his “extreme metaphors”. His point in the previous line is that the alien life is us. Ballard’s futures were guided by Freud and the surrealists; he understood that we’re always besieged by unconscious desires, which we project onto the exterior world. That we live inside our own heads, a landscape that looks a little like certain early 20th-century paintings. Never more so than in his early disaster novels, which are so frequently claimed as predictive of climate disaster, but which more closely resemble strange dreams set inside the canvasses of Giorgio de Chirico.

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None of this is to say that he didn’t enjoy playing up to the role demanded of his public image. One of his favourite soundbites was that the scenarios he imagined were in fact “dangerous bends ahead”. That’s Jim the adman, writing copy for a specific audience, deftly fending off readers who might not wish to grapple with the more challenging moral ambiguity of his extreme scenarios. Dig a little deeper, though, and he does tell us what he really thinks about prophets. In a diary piece written in 1999, he wrote:

“I remember in the Sixties being rung up by journalists asking: ‘What will sex be like in the Seventies?’ They expected something strange and unimaginable, but looking back after 20 years, it all seemed much the same. A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won’t happen.”

Ballard repeatedly told us that his imagination was the greatest tool he possessed, but he appreciated its limits. The technologies he was interested in are those we take for granted and the aspects of our lives he studied are those we prefer not to notice. To call him a prophet is to cheapen his achievement; he was in fact a skilled analyst of the present, who placed us all on the couch.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

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That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

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Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

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The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

On Beauty is a campus novel, and it’s a book about identity. Howard Belsey is white and English, teaching at the fictional (but very Harvard-ish) Wellington College; his wife Kiki is American and black, and so are his three children. His great rival in his field — which is Rembrandt studies — is Monty Kipps, who is black and Trinidanian-British and (this is perhaps the most important part) a conservative Christian, while Howard is an atheist and a liberal. “Howard,” we learn, “had always disliked Monty, as any sensible man would dislike a man who had dedicated his life to the perverse politics of right-wing iconoclasm”. It is not exactly irrelevant that Monty has published his Rembrandt book while Howard’s is a perpetual work-in-progress.

Their animosity is played out on the field of aesthetics (Howard teaches his students that “prettiness is the mask that power wears”, while Monty says things like “poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized”); it is driven by their ideological differences; and, when Monty joins Howard’s department, it is all forced through the meatgrinder of office politics. By the end of the novel, Howard isn’t holding onto his anti-Monty beliefs from principle—if principle was ever the whole story behind them—but because his career depends on them prevailing. (The same is true for Monty.)

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This is, of course, as things have always been on campus, and it has never mattered very much. Part of the joy of the campus novel, historically, is that the closed world of the university provides a small canvas for the satirical humiliation of small men with petty ambitions living lives of minor hypocrisy — think of Lucky Jim or The History Man. But over the twenty-first century, beefs that were once safely contained in the common room have spilled over into the real world.

Partly that’s down to technology: Howard is a technophobe who won’t use a mobile phone, but his 2020 equivalent is on Twitter all day firing off 37-part BUCKLE UP threads with the intention of destabilising his enemies. The recent scuffle at Cambridge over free speech, which came down to whether opposing viewpoints needed to be “respected” or merely “tolerated”, played out across social media and in the press. The ability to follow — and participate in — academic drama in real time makes all of us bit-players in a campus novel, all the time.

But it’s also because the seemingly arcane business of theoretical analysis turns out to matter very much to how we think about ourselves. Howard’s Marxist analysis of art as power, while not exactly false, asserts a deterministic relationship between who we are and what we feel. At the same time, his children are all living experiments in identity. 15-year-old Levi adopts a kind of universalised political blackness that would deny his middle-class advantages, with an ersatz Brooklyn twang: his gently satirised adventures in identity make him a forerunner of British adherents to the US Black Lives Matter movement, who talk as though Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, UK were politically interchangeable. (The people he attempts to make common cause with see through him, of course.)

Howard’s daughter Zora follows her father through the university system with uncomfortable closeness. And most shockingly to Howard Jerome, his eldest, rebels by converting to Christianity and falling in with the Kipps family. Smith describes gorgeously the pleasure that can come from giving up one’s habitual beliefs: “When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demanded equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk back further into the receiving sofa.” There’s an almost erotic deliciousness sometimes in submitting to the views of the other, and for Jerome, Monty’s refusal to speak according to the script is thrilling.

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The battle for Jerome’s soul only heightens the professional rivalry between Howard and Monty, which reaches a climax over (of course) a question of free speech. Monty has proposed to deliver a lecture series called “Taking the Liberal Out of the Liberal Arts”. Howard — accusing Monty of homophobia, sexism and racism — demands that Monty should give the department a preview of the lectures’ text so they can excise any material deemed counter to the institution’s internal “hate laws”.

Monty rebuffs him, on the obvious First Amendment grounds: “If it will make him feel better — I know how much the liberal mind likes to feel better — I hold myself completely responsible for the contents of the lectures I give.” But there’s another, perhaps even more compelling, argument he doesn’t even need to make, because his skin can say it for him: if Howard’s analysis of power is correct, why should a white man be able to dictate how a black man talks about race?

You can tell that Howard is going to lose the departmental vote on this when a colleague asks: “Is the liberal consciousness […] really so slight that it cannot survive a series of six lectures that come from a perspective other than its own?” The scene feels like the forerunner to every conversation that’s been had over the last 12 months about no-platforming, hate speech and intellectual freedom — not, obviously, because Smith is a soothsayer, but because she delineates a tendency that has since grown to monstrous proportions.

The question of who gets to speak, and for whom, is a pointed one for the novelist. In late 2019, Smith published the essay “Fascinated to Presume”, which was either a defence of fiction or a farewell to it: “what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally,” she wrote. 2020 responded by beginning with a concerted campaign to destroy an author for having the temerity to write Latino characters while being white.

The novel at the centre of that furore (American Dirt) is no On Beauty. Still, the bitter reaction to its very existence — led, depressingly, by other novelists, who seemed like Howard determined to judge the book only as the bearer of a system of power — felt like a rebuke to the entire concept of fiction. As Smith had said in her essay: “The old — and never especially helpful — adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.”

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The truth about 'American Dirt'

By Jesse Singal

But to write fiction is necessarily to invent your way into the other, to think what might be thought by such-and-such a person in such-and-such a situation, no matter how remote from you. Smith is cagy about moral arguments for the novel — art should be pleasurable, not medicinal. Nevertheless, “Fascinated to Presume” points out that to forbid imagining beyond your immediate identity it to forbid the possibility of community: “without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all.”

The first section of On Beauty is called “Kipps and Belsey”, and its epigraph sums up the dysfunction between Howard and Monty: “We refuse to be each other.” By rejecting the possibility of sympathy, they seal themselves into a relationship of mutual destruction. On Beauty, though, asks that we find some compassion for both. This is not necessarily easy: Howard is priggish; Monty is domineering; both would be for it if this novel were set in the #MeToo era. Both of them are wrong. Both deserve at least the justice of being understood.

Of course, On Beauty is a novel of its time, and one detail that feels very 2005 rather than 2020 is that Monty was able to rely on his academic colleagues’ underlying commitment to free speech. The “liberal consciousness” no longer seems to have the same confidence in its own resilience, as evidenced by the backlash to the Harpers open letter on free speech or the hounding of columnist Suzanne Moore at the Guardian for her dissent from the orthodoxy on gender identity. Individuals who find themselves holding unpopular opinions in liberal institutions today are at least as likely to encounter shunning, denunciation and career death as they are principled support.

The room to be wrong — whether that’s allowing someone else to be wrong by your lights, or allowing that you yourself could possibly be wrong — is vanishingly small. Smith’s novel is a window into another way of thinking, where difference can be a pleasure rather than pure threat. It’s also a declaration that pleasure matters. Calls to “decolonise the canon” have a certain justice, but they fall back too hard on the knee-jerk denigration of the “dead white male”. Sure, some are overrated; but what good is a politics that forces you to chuck E. M. Forster in the bin? In On Beauty’s revision of Howards End, Smith meets the other as an equal — irreverently, affectionately — and makes something new.

This vision of a consumer that sits alone in their home, clicks on their desires, tunes into entertainment and reclines in their easy chair to wait for all their wishes to be granted may seem as contemporary as it gets. But it was the premise of E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops – which was published in 1909.

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Does dirty money make the art world go round?

By Libby Emmons

The eerily prescient tale opens with Vashti, a woman who doesn’t leave her underground home. She doesn’t need to. No one leaves their little cells to venture out in to a post-apocalyptic world. They don’t have to: all needs are met by an omnipotent ‘Machine’. Communication with others is done via instant messaging and video conferencing. In any case, people have no inclination to meet up; they only want to share ideas. And the Machine knows what you want, without you having to ask…

It doesn’t feel so far removed from Amazon’s promise that, with its new “Prime Air delivery drone”, consumers will be able to go from click to delivery in 30 minutes. The convenience of such almost-instant gratification will be irresistible.

Meanwhile, Walmart is rolling out a beta version of their in-home delivery service – a direct rival to Amazon Fresh and Fresh Direct. Instead of boxes of food being left on doorsteps, the shopping will actually be delivered to your kitchen. Your fridge and cupboards will be stocked by Walmart employees, with the help of body cams on the drivers and special security locks on homes. They will even pick up returns for you if you leave them on your kitchen counter. You can wave at them from your reclining easy chair, if you can stand to look up from your screen to have a brief, real-life interaction with a stranger.

So often in our culture we avoid each other. We avoid taking the lift for fear we will encounter another person; we keep our air pods in-ear in the supermarket queue, or use self-checkout. Living in New York City, the most populated city in America, it is possible to go for whole days without speaking to another human being. We keep our eyes on our screens, recorded voices in our ears.

Phones, apps, laptops, smart watches, fit bits and GPS devices, drones and delivery trucks. We have built our machine around ourselves, swaddling ourselves with our own tech – mind, body, and soul.

It is salutary, then, to consider the ghostly, empty shells of humanity in Forster’s story.

Vashti’s relationship with her son Kuno is the most awkward thing in her life, because he wants to see her in person. She’s so busy with the interface that she barely has the time for travel – plus, she doesn’t want to (his cell is on the other side of the world). It takes multiple and increasingly demanding missives from Kuno to get her to leave her home, and board the air ship to see him.

But still, Kuno is a troublemaker. Everyone else seems content to live in an echo chamber, where new ideas are not as well attended as old ideas, reframed. “Beware of first-hand ideas!” one of the Machine’s believers says in the last chapter:

“First-hand ideas do not really exist… Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation.”

It’s like Forster is satirising Twitter!

But Kuno is not content with living to serve the machine and be served by it. He wishes to see the Earth’s surface, feel its dirt, breathe its air, even though humans have lost the ability to live there. This very notion is apostasy. In The Machine Stops, the catered luxury of a thoroughly machine-facilitated life is the reward for those who put their faith in the machine. Those who won’t are threatened with homelessness, forced out onto the Earth’s inhospitable surface, and left for dead. This punishment is what Kuno wishes to embrace. He laments:

“We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills.”

He is alluding to the machine’s match-making service, which pairs off mates specifically for the act of reproduction and nothing else. Once conception has occurred, the parties are returned to their private, efficient existences; once the baby is weaned, it too is removed to a communal nursery. There is just enough human contact to continue the species – but it is done without joy, without love and without any long-term relationships.

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We have something similar today. People swipe, chat, maybe meet up, maybe hook up, maybe get knocked up, and move on with their lives, independently, without regret, and without connection.

Perhaps, 110 years after The Machine Stops was published, we are not as different from our ancestors as we think we are. We tend to believe we are making progress, but our desire to exert minimal effort remains the same. Yet we ridicule those who came before us for their ignorance. Vashti does, too:

“And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own–the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.”

Forster predicted that humankind would, through technological development, give itself over to the mercy of an overweening power – with a sense that it’s what we’re entitled to. Now, we bemoan how we are cut off from each other just as we cut ourselves off more. We tweet and post about how much we need a break from tech, only to stay as integrated as ever, because the truth is that we are past the point of no return. We are locked into our progress.

We won’t turn back because we can’t turn back. We will submit to the drones and deliveries.

And what does that mean for the future? Right now, we hold the interface with our hands; it is separate from us. But the predictions are that it will increasingly become part of our physical form, it will be impossible to tell where a human being ends and technology begins. This is a kind of apocalypse – an apocalypse of the human form.

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By Julie Bindel

And as scary as it sounds, it is a burgeoning reality that we barely notice, because it feels natural. People are already beginning to adopt these forms, linking to tech in a full and permanent way with chips and robotic limbs. It could make us stronger; but it could also turn us into exactly what Forster feared.

The interface could, eventually, become the reality itself. We once used our senses to reach out to the known and unknown world, to glean knowledge, or at least perception. In the future, we will reach with our interface, our machine.

And just as philosophers like Kant, Berkley and Plato questioned what our senses are – their reliability, their veracity – we must question our machine interface.

Because sinking into the comfort of believing the reality our interface presents could destroy us. And this destruction will happen inch by insidious inch. We won’t even notice the point at which we become neither human nor machine, but comfy blobs rehashing the same tired ideas, utterly enslaved to the machine we built to serve us. Might we be able to stop it from happening? Might we be able to stay awake and question and resist? We do still have the choice. But Forster didn’t hold out much hope.