'"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that."' E.M. Forster is best known for his exquisite novels, but these two affecting short stories brilliantly combine the fantastical with the allegorical. In 'The Machine Stops', humanity has isolated itself beneath the ground, enmeshed in automated comforts, and in 'The Celestial Omnibus' a young boy takes a trip his parents believe impossible. This book contains The Machine Stops and A Celestial Omnibus.

A prophetic story about social isolation and dependence on technology written over a century ago by the Nobel Prize–nominated author. In a future version of planet Earth, most of the human population doesn’t venture above ground. Rarely do they even leave their own rooms, in which all of their needs are met by the Machine. The Machine allows the humans to communicate “ideas” with one another, which is essentially their only activity. It doesn’t stop them from leaving their rooms, but they have little desire to do so anyway. They’ve started to believe the Machine is omnipotent and omniscient, not to be questioned. And when it begins to malfunction, they trust that it knows what it’s doing—forgetting they invented it in the first place . . . From the author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and other classic novels, and a sixteen-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this remarkable science fiction story, which was included in a Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology, was published in 1909—yet becomes more relevant and thought-provoking with each passing day of the twenty-first century.

In 1909 E.M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote his one work of dystopian science fiction, The Machine Stops, which imagines the world in the aftermath of an ecological crisis, where humans live in underground chambers without physical contact. Here, 12 artists--Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström and R. Lyon, Ed Atkins, Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Pedro Neves Marques, Tobias Madison, Jeff Nagy, Rachel Rose, Bea Schlingelhoff and Mariana Silva--contribute texts addressing culture in the networked age.--artbook.com.

What is the significance of December 21, 2012? In this groundbreaking book, Tim Lyons offers a multi-faceted answer to that question by applying the principles of western astrology to time measurement that the ancient Maya called the Long Count, a period that began in 3114 BC and that ends on December 21, 2012. Drawing on the historical studies of Lewis Mumford, Arnold Toynbee, and others, Tim finds connections between the Mayan aeon and our own astrological ages, uses our astrological tools to draw meaning from the Mayan time-measurements, and demonstrates the correlations between the Mayan measurements and the many important historical developments from the past 5125 years. In his last chapter, Tim casts a horoscope for the aeon beginning on the winter solstice 2012, seeking similarities and differences between that horoscope and the one for August 11, 3114 BC. Concluding that the Long Count horoscope symbolizes a type of social development characterized by authoritarian militarism and leading to ecological destruction, and showing how those tendencies have worked themselves out through time in tandem with important transits and progressions to that horoscope, he connects social, psychological, and spiritual elements to give a clear diagnosis of the problems facing human civilization. Seeing the Long Count as measuring "the era of bigness," he suggests that the future will see the development of smaller institutions arising as adaptations to the dominant model that has now run its course.

The Machine Stops "The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.