Did This Writer Foresee The Internet Age In 1909 ?

I have read a couple of novels by The British writer Edward Morgan Forster. They being " A Passage To India " and " Howards End " Both of which where later made into film. However he also wrote amongst others a short Science Fiction story titled " The Machine Stops " written in 1909. A story i have not actually read, and also the only Science Fiction work he ever wrote.

Within the story he writes of a future post-apocalyptic world where people communicate by the use of video screens. I came across this article and what is stated certainly sounds like the computer age we live in today. So i have posted it here for other ATS members to comment with their own opinions. As for me, it is something i will certainly be reading asap.

"He predicts the internet in the days before even radio was a mass medium. "It would have all seemed so far-fetched back in that time, when people weren't even used to telephones - and that makes it more relevant now than it was in his time - he was anticipating technology like the internet and Skype. "And he predicts, with astonishing accuracy, the effect the technology has on our relations with one another, with our bodies, with our philosophy and culture. "It's a warning for now for what we might be getting ourselves into."

www.bbc.co.uk...

How many books have gotten the future wrong? A broken clock is right twice a day you know.

Interesting story but I just think he was writing a book not trying to predict the future.

Well, what man can imagine, he can do... I'm fairly certain that many in our long history thought of such a thing, especially once radio was cemented, though... it logically follows.

Hmmm... it also logically follows that we destroy ourselves if we let our ape part control us or lose ourselves in our tech.

I (and millions others) foresee a large segment of the population in the near future totally immersing themselves in virtual dreamworlds.

I (and many others) postulate we could even be in such an environment now (though the bad parts of this world indicate a certain level of reality!).

a reply to: alldaylong

I think there have been a few prophecy regarding this

the earliest one i can think of is the Hopi Natives talking of a great spiderweb that will cover the earth

Hopi prophecys

a reply to: 3NL1GHT3N3D1

Interesting story but I just think he was writing a book not trying to predict the future.

There lies the problem.

One can never see into another's mind.

a reply to: 3NL1GHT3N3D1

Maybe he wasn't trying to predict the future. But then again I doubt many of the gizmos we have now that were inspired by scifi were meant to be inspired in the first place, just part of the story. So happy accident that the dude was on point maybe?

a reply to: alldaylong

That was a very good read, thanks!

Like Forster, I also focus much more on the effects of technology on humans than the technology itself. It really is a fascinating subject. The fact that he saw this coming so early is quite remarkable.

soulwaxer

originally posted by: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
How many books have gotten the future wrong? A broken clock is right twice a day you know.

Interesting story but I just think he was writing a book not trying to predict the future.

Bingo. And this is also the response I give to people who say things like "everyone I think of x he calls", that they are not remembering all the times they though of x and he never called.

originally posted by: DOCHOLIDAZE1
a reply to: alldaylong


Hopi prophecys

What a load of ..what'd the right word...horse sh*t those prophecies are

Oh and they were so wise they couldn't see their own demise and the arrival of white men. Yeah right.

a reply to: alldaylong

We read that in high school! I always liked the story. There are some aspects that are kind of techie but almost anything can be read a certain way. I thought it was more of a warning about dependency upon technology.

Ever read Magester Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) by Herman Hesse? That is even more about the internet and multi media. And it was published in 1943 (and written years before that) before the transistor was invented. Or was that reverse engineered from a crashed UFO? (Hehehe). And even now, I am sitting here typing this while I have my iPod on so the combination of computers, music, the net, and lyrics all collide in a mish-mash of meanings.

Take the space between us, fill it up some way - The Police

Thanks for bringing the story to a wider audience because it deserves to be read!

a reply to: 3danimator2014

What a load of ..what'd the right word...horse sh*t those prophecies are

Oh and they were so wise they couldn't see their own demise and the arrival of white men. Yeah right.

Where does it say knowing the future ensures you can change it?

Imagine 1000 years from now if the planet is destroyed by carbon emissions. "Im sick of hearing that stupid science fairy tale magic, if they supposedly knew about global warming why didn't they do anything about it?"

And I realize that's a heavily contested issue by some, so insert whatever... "If they knew _____ would go extinct then why would they let it?"

originally posted by: boncho
a reply to: 3danimator2014

What a load of ..what'd the right word...horse sh*t those prophecies are

Oh and they were so wise they couldn't see their own demise and the arrival of white men. Yeah right.

Where does it say knowing the future ensures you can change it?

Imagine 1000 years from now if the planet is destroyed by carbon emissions. "Im sick of hearing that stupid science fairy tale magic, if they supposedly knew about global warming why didn't they do anything about it?"

And I realize that's a heavily contested issue by some, so insert whatever... "If they knew _____ would go extinct then why would they let it?"

I accept your point. But I still don't buy it. But I will admit I have done zero research into them and their prophecies. Who knows I guess eh?

My only brush with predictions are of Nostradamus and those are ridiculous.

They had photographs back in the 1900's, and people were experimenting with television. The first transatlantic broadcast was in 1926. The CRT was invented in 1897, and by 1911, many people had broadcast pictures over wireless.

en.wikipedia.org...

It's fairly easy to extrapolate that to large flat screens

a reply to: 3danimator2014

???? why exactly are you mad at these prophecy's? can you articulate?

a reply to: alldaylong

Because your real dad was so sad to see what you've become on the internets and travelled back in time to warn him...

Thanks for that - very interesting. It is amazing how someone can envision what the future will hold.

I am still amazed at how accurate Orwell was in his writing, cctv, telescreen, changing history (oh look, CIA deletes the only copy of a document. BLT).

Also, movies sometimes have a lot of these kind of references too, if you look closely. The most obvious ones I am thinking of are in 2001 : A Space Odyssey in which one of the astronauts is eating and is using (what looks like) an iPad to watch the news. Then another scene where someone does a video call to his daughter on earth. This was filmed in 68, ffs.
Kubrick was a genius!

I would like to see some people here predict what will happen/be invented next week, let alone decades in the future.

Love his books, especially Room with a view.I will read this scifi of his, sounds interesting.

If you really want to see something freaky, read Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon"....

The shape and size of the vehicle would closely resemble the Apollo command/service module spacecraft.

The number of men in the crew would be three.

A competition for the launch site would ensue between Florida and Texas which actually was resolved in Congress in the 1960s with KSC as the Flordia launch site and Houston, Texas as the Mission Control Center.

A telescope would be able to view the progress of the journey. When Apollo 13 exploded, a telescope at Johnson Space Center witnessed the event which happened more than 200,000 miles from Earth.

The Verne spacecraft would use retro-rockets which became a technology assisting Neil Armstrong and his crewmates in their journey to the Moon.

Verne predicted weightlessness although his concept was slightly flawed in thinking it only was experienced at the gravitational midpoint of the journey (when the Moon and Earth gravity balanced).

The first men to journey to the Moon would return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean just where Apollo 11 splashed down in July of 1969 one hundred and six years after the initial publishing of Jules Verne's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.

And there's more, such as the vehicle having stages, and launching from Cape Canaveral, etc. Just eerie.....

a reply to: alldaylong

There is a lot of science-fiction writing that has sparked ideas and technology--it doesn't mean that they predicted such technology.

And like others have said: It's not so much a prediction as just an imagined way of life that happens to have a few kernels of truth, apparently.

At the most, this is what would be called a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the prophecy would have been known well before the technology was developed, so it's impossible to prove that he predicted anything instead of planted an idea seed in someone--or that it's just a coincidence altogether.

With so many fantastical ideas in sci-fi, some are bound to be correct decades or centuries later.

a reply to: 3danimator2014

My only brush with predictions are of Nostradamus and those are ridiculous.

Nostradamus is a pretty crappy period of history for seeking evidence of prophecy and spiritual guidance from deities. The world was essentially in a dark age still. I'm not sure it's ever gotten out of or ever will either.

Before Rome, before there were many pagan religions. There were the Sumers with their gods and their incredibly histories and around this time and shortly after, whether it was in Babylonia, or across to the Egyptian Nile, over the seas in the Aztec, or Mayan lands, everywhere really... there were many spiritual realities, there was amazingly vast knowledge, of the Earth and its position in the solar system, its roundness, and other incredible knowledge about the universe and everything in it, it was all at the ancients' fingertips.

In the following millennia, with the death of Christ, the birth of Christianity and other Abrahamic religions, the darkness rose up and consumed the world as it was known. Paganism was outlawed and Christianity flourished. But not the teaching of Jesus per se, more like a bastardized form of his efforts, used to control and manipulate the populace. With religious wars absolutely desecrating the world over the next millennia, and with the Barbarian raids on Egypt and Greece, the library of Alexandria was lost, and with it (likely) more knowledge than the world may have produced in hundreds of years following. With the rise of monotheistic religions, and empires built on them, it injected a new breed of man to rule the world. Good vs evil. Right vs wrong. And I think spirituality was left somewhere in that Library before it was burned.