In 1909, while at work on Howards End, Forster published a short story, ‘The Machine Stops’, which offers an even bleaker vision of the influence machines would come to have over humanity in Forster’s view: by setting his story in the future, he can project a nightmare dystopian vision of a world in which humans worship ‘the Machine’ as a godlike entity, and live their lives entirely through technology (among other things, the story predicts Skype, instant messaging, and the internet more widely). The epigraph to Howards Ends ('Only Connect') contains the major theme of the novel: the power and the difficulty of sustaining connections among humans. Science, instead of freeing man … is enslaving him to machines … God what a prospect!’ Tellingly, he describes the motorcar as ‘the throbbing, stinking car’ in the novel itself.
He wrote in his diary on 27 January 1908, shortly before beginning the novel, that ‘I have been born at the end of the age of peace and can’t expect to feel anything but despair.
Forster was deeply sceptical about modern life in many respects. Any analysis of Forster’s novel must contend with Forster’s deeply contradictory stance on this question.
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