Rating: WORTHY!
Edward Morgan Forster published this very short story (only some 25 pages) in 1909, and I came to it by way of an article online that claimed (as does Wikipedia) that the novel is eerily prescient of life today under Coronavirus, but that's bullshit!
There's one thing and one thing only that's similar which is that the story depicts a society where everyone typically lives in isolation from others, communicating using a video system. But that's it. In this story people are not forcibly confined to their homes under threat of a virus! They choose to live that way from habituation, and they're not struggling with it any more than they are struggling to provide food for themselves! Every single thing is laid on for them; they're spoiled rotten. There is no comparison whatsoever to the world today and it's insulting to claim there is.
A much better comparison is to the short story is Pixar's movie Wall-E, where humans are carried around on chairs and everything is done for them. True, there's no isolation, but in every other regard it's pretty much the same story. They're confined to a spacecraft whereas in Forster's story they're confined underground, they live in fear of the surface of planet Earth, and are totally under the thrall of technology. Forster's story is a tale of caution against too much reliance on machines and therein lies the comparison to modern day living.
Predictably the story doesn't end well with the machine breaking down. It's right there in the title. What I find mysterious is how, in 1909, the author managed to tell the story at precisely the time that this event came to pass. Was he psychic? Was he simply a great predictor of events? Or was he just very lucky? I'm kidding! Of course he'd tell it then because otherwise where's the interest?
All kidding aside, I commend this story as a decent read. It's of its time and unrealistic in the sense that far too many dystopian novels are: they show everyone conforming whereas in real life such a thing would never happen because there are far too many rebellious and non-conformist souls who would never submit, but it does carry a valid warning about too much dependence on machines and that resonates now more than ever with technology occupying such a huge proportion of our lives today.
