In a watershed 1909 story, published when science fiction was known still as “scientific romance,” E. M. Forster reimagined the Victorian dream of an empire of universal knowledge as a future tyranny gorged on endless information. Citizens of his brave new world lived, contentedly, in bunkerlike quarters serviced by a small, personal terminal for a global, Weblike system that brought the user food, music, visual entertainments, books, articles, and correspondence both anonymous and intimate—and that did not simply satisfy the desire for those things, but intuited and perhaps even created it. The network was called “the Machine,” and the story was “The Machine Stops.
