I just came a across a blog post, comparing 'The machine stops' with 'Wall-E'
From here:
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008...pixars-wall-e/
It was so short I'll just quote the whole thing:
Quote:
Machines Do Stop: E.M. Forster & Pixar’s WALL-E
Matthew Battles - July 1st, 2008
Pixar’s WALL-E, which opened in theaters across the country this weekend, breaks new ground in one respect: it’s a dystopian sci-fi epic with an unambiguously happy ending. Critics have noted the film’s debt to such science fiction classics as the seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey and Nick Park’s wacky claymation escapade, A Grand Day Out. But the Pixar film’s most thoroughly worked-out allusion, to a somewhat obscure short story by E. M. Forster, so far has gone unnoticed.
Well known among science fiction mavens, the 1909 Forster short story “The Machine Stops” is famous for its vision of eco-catastrophe and for its premonitory description of a system of worldwide media not unlike the Internet. The story’s text is widely available online, and has been anthologized in print as well.
As in WALL-E, “The Machine Stops” is set on a future Earth whose surface has been blasted into inhabitability by waste and pollution. Writing when radio was in its infancy, Forster (best known for his novel A Passage to India) imagined an intermediated hypercivilization in which people connect to one another through electronic screens—a videoconferencing dystopia unnervingly reminiscent of some of today’s social media. While WALL-E’s human population has escaped into space, in Forster’s tale they have created a vast subterranean civilization. In both stories, however, humanity has grown fat and sessile thanks to automated systems that serve their every need. Whisked from screen to screen in automated chairs, they’re unable to interact with the world without electronic mediation. And in both stories, the systems break down.
Although WALL-E and “The Machine Stops” come to seemingly opposite conclusions, both tales envision a belated reckoning with the wages of technological progress. I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether Forster’s bleak vision or Pixar’s more saccharine ending is persuasive—or if the likeliest outcome lies somewhere in between.
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