On the surface, this seems like a fairly straightforward and typical dystopian cautionary tale, but if you consider it's original publication date, then this is a truly visionary story. ( )

This story from 1909 brought to mind an interview between JG Ballard and Carol Orr from 1974:

BALLARD: … It’s quite obvious that nothing is going to exist at all that doesn’t serve some sort of imaginative role in the future. It won’t simply be because we won’t notice its existence – just as we don’t notice a piece of furniture unless it happens also to be an aesthetic object, if it conforms to various visual conventions of the day.

We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza. I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.

ORR: I don’t.

BALLARD: Most people do, actually.

ORR: I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either.

BALLARD: No, I didn’t suggest that you should be. But I’m saying that you probably have more privacy in your life than you realise. One lives in a world where, even if one’s apartment or hotel room tends to be small, one tends to be the only occupant of it. One is not living in something like an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century city where it was, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations, in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case.

Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. ‘Being alone on a dune’ is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realise, compared with the life you would have lived fifty years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think of a medieval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more.

The city or the town or the suburb or the street – these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
( )

Um conto incrível, astuto e bem desenvolvido. Em 1908, Foster escreveu sobre uma humanidade abandonada às ideias em abrigos subterrâneos de reclusão sustentável com um sistema global de gerenciamento eficiente. Mas nem tudo é ideia, entendida mais como informação, a incorporação nos trazendo um idealismo de máquina, aqui algo impessoal, conectado, internético, como o formigueiro de flusser, de um humano em fluxo de imagens. Mas e a superfície da Terra? E a decadência da Máquina, seu colapso? E com ele uma espécie de sonho de uma humanidade livre da prisão da carne, mas presa à mesquinharia do mecânico. ( )

E. M. Forster's dystopian tale of human beings living beneath the surface of the earth, dependent on a large machine to serve all their needs. There is little or no contact between people other than through the phone (like Skype) where they see and speak with one another. Lives are inactive and purposeless.

What fascinated me the most about this story was the fact that it was written in 1909 and yet it foreshadows an overly dependent world of technology, that is sometimes all too real today. The ideas here might not seem earth-shattering, in that many of them have been explored in other places, but this is surely among one of the first presentations and deserves some credit and audience.

I find these kinds of stories more frightening than supernatural ones. This particular scenario might be far-fetched, but something of its kind seems to me to be all too achievable by mankind. ( )

Didn't think that such an old book could speak to the heart of men on subjects so modern.
The obsession with "becoming more spiritual", time and getting ideas from second or third hand. The dependency and hypocrisy in lifestyles, the flesh becoming weaker.

And humanity sinking in the dark.

All of this resonated deeply with me.

One of the best, if not the best, books that I have read this year. ( )