I was speaking to a friend the other day about the books we read in our youth (which is oh, just a few years ago now). And in particular, those novels of a prophetic nature. My friend has just come back from a trip to America, where he lived for many years before returning to the UK just before Trump got in for a second term.

He talked about what Trump’s people are getting away with, and related it back to (I think) Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Brave New World’, and a fictional state telling its people to ignore the evidence of what they see and experience, and instead believe the “truth” the state is telling them. [1.] This, of course, is something unscrupulous regimes have always done. The fictional societies described in books like Brave New World, and Orwell’s ‘1984’ are extrapolations from states the authors will have seen, or in some cases experienced first hand.

The difference now is in the technology being developed and used by devious, evil-minders leaders (and would-be leaders), even in the so-called ‘Free World’. They no longer need to tell people to ignore what they see, when there is the capability to show people something that appears to be real (even though it isn’t). Video evidence that looks incontrovertible may have been artificially created by artificial intelligence, proving quite clearly the alternative ‘reality’ they would have us believe. My friend said he had a bad feeling about the way things are going, and how they might end, and I’m afraid I share that sentiment.

One thing none of those books predicted, my friend pointed out, was mobile phone technology. I guess they were never going to get everything right. We agreed that one of the pieces of fiction that most accurately predicted the future was E. M. Forster’s (yes, he of ‘Room With a View’ and ‘Passage to India’ fame) short story ‘The Machine Stops’. In this particular future society most people live underground in closed rooms with all their needs provided for, and spend their time exchanging ideas, through what looks very much like our own internet, with people across the globe. Not entirely accurate, since most of us are still getting out and about quite a bit. Although, as anthropomorphic climate degradation progresses, we may yet have to retreat underground.

All those years ago in our youth, when my friend and I started a band, we used the title of the short story, and I recorded under the name ‘The Machine Stops’ for many years after. I never ‘made it’. Although who knows, as I’m still writing music, (and getting better all the time). It’s never too late to break out from the shade. Maybe I’ll share some of my songs on this blog sometime soon.

[1.] Some time later it occurred to me that this is exactly how religions operate – ‘believe what we tell you, even though it contradicts everything you can see, and know to be true.’