In the spring of 2020, almost a century after his final novel was published, E. M. Forster was suddenly current. On social media, on the BBC website and in web publications like The Nautilus, commentators hemmed in by the global Covid-19 pandemic found in Forster an unlikely prophet of their newly isolated and richly mediated existence (Perkowitz 2020; Gompertz 2020). Confined to their homes, wrapped in a machinic embrace, lulled by the hum of electronics and gorging on information whose circulation they were themselves sustaining, readers across the globe might be forgiven for identifying with the protagonists, not of Forster’s Edwardian novels of class and interpersonal relations, but of his 1909 novella ‘The Machine Stops’. One of the earliest descriptions of a total media system as the twentieth century would come to know it, ‘The Machine Stops’ imagines humankind ensconced in honeycomb-like cells underground, with music, books and information available at the touch of a button. Travel, though once common, has become an anxious experience, as residents of an earth altered by unspecified ecological devastation resist the urge to journey by airship merely to see the interior of another human residence. Presiding above it all – until its titular arrest – is the Machine, a substitute God in the form of an all-surrounding technological envelope whose continued smooth functioning has become its own justification. As the character Vashti tells her son, Kuno, ‘You mustn’t say anything against the Machine’ (Forster 1928: 4).

Forster, attentive as he was to the nuances of embodied human connection, saw in his own time the first whispers of a technologised future in which humans risked a terrible corporeal attenuation: ‘Men seldom moved their bodies,’ the narrator tells us; ‘all unrest was concentrated in the soul’ (10). Kuno, who emerges as the doomed hero of the tale, struggles against the perceptual effects of the technological cocoon. Kuno’s attempts to convince his mother of the Machine’s dehumanising effects ground Forster’s tale in the language of its fin-de-siècle media ecosystem: ‘We say “space is annihilated,” but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves’ (17). Better, in Kuno’s mind, to return to an unmediated, direct bodily experience of the world in which ‘Man is the measure’ (18).