E. M. Forster's second collection of short stories was published seventeen years after his first,
The Celestial Omnibus(1911). Like the earlier collection,
The Eternal Moment(1928) is an assembly of six stories of varying length but amounting to a little over a hundred pages in all. Though published after
A Passage to India(1924) they were all written by 1914.
The first story is a dystopian vision of the future called “The Machine Stops”, which, until the last minute, was to have been the title of the whole book. In this unusual piece of science fiction, after Wells but prior to Huxley and Orwell, machinery has taken over and functions perfectly to meet the basic needs of humans who are isolated and soulless. People live in solitary cells beneath the earth's surface shut off from
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Citation: Childs, Peter. "The Eternal Moment". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=952, accessed 23 November 2024.]
