On Black Friday, we only bought a few used books at the thrift store. My wife bought several of the mysteries that she and her mother enjoy, and I found a copy of 1984, which I remember a lot about, but don’t remember reading anymore.

That night was all reruns, so we watched internet videos, one of which was a BBC dramatisation of The Machine Stops, a 1909 short story by EM Forster.

You may know EM Forster from reading or watching A Room With a View, Howard’s End or A Passage to India.

Forster’s story envisioned a world in which everyone mostly stays put in their below-ground, climate-controlled quarters, communicating with others only across a video screen network. Needs are met and lives are managed by machines, known collectively as The Machine. Asimov wrote many short stories with a similar theme of humans served and managed by a well-meaning central computer, THX-1138 showed medicated humans in underground cells, and the recent film Wall-E portrayed a space ark of chubby passengers tended by an evil device, but in Forster’s story the Machine is neither good nor evil. When working perfectly, the Machine is as good as designed, but humans only remember how to make limited repairs. Entropy prevails:

… But for the most part panic reigned, and men spent their strength praying to their Books, tangible proofs of the Machine’s omnipotence. There were gradations of terror - at times came rumours of hope - the Mending Apparatus was almost mended - the enemies of the Machine had been got under- new “nerve-centres” were evolving which would do the work even more magnificently than before. But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended.

Peak oil and climate doomers present tales like The Machine Stops as a perfect analogy for our faltering financial system, or even our industrial society, but I’ve been reading repeated predictions of impending doom for almost a decade now.

While I drove us back to Baltimore, my wife read a few chapters of Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and Abundance aloud to me. She had latched on to the book as soon as it came out of the box. Astyk addresses the current situation in practical terms that other homemakers can understand. While no Pollyanna, she believes that if we prepare, we can fashion decent lives while using much less energy. Now my wife wants to cancel some utilities and rebuild the kitchen without the refrigerator.