Forster's novella The Machine Stops established the essential outlines of the dystopian parable. It is set, of course, in the future, at a time when men have abandoned the surface of the earth to live in massive underground cities resembling air-conditioned anthills. Here, in a completely controlled and artificial environment, they are removed from all contact with Nature…. (p. 90)

In this story … Forster has anticipated most, if not quite all, of the themes of subsequent dystopian novels: the horrors of a society "perfected" by technology; the totalitarian face of a regime deifying "reason" in all its regulations; the denial of the body, the passions and the instincts, and the consequent automatization of man; and the lone rebel's attempt to escape from his mega-civilization and return to Nature. As in the classic dystopias, the rebel fails, crushed beneath the juggernaut of the Machine; but here the Machine fails too. One day the Machine stops. And in a few elegiac pages, Forster movingly chronicles the death of a world. (p. 91)

[Many contend that] The Machine Stops lacks the immediacy of the trio of important dystopian novels that follow it—We (1924), Brave New World (1932), and 1984 (1948)—because "it concentrates on the technological aspects of Utopianism and pays scant attention to its social and political implications." I would argue, however, that precisely this concentration on the technological characterizes all these dystopian works as well as other significant examples of the genre: C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength (1946), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), David Karp's One (1953), L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice (1961), Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed (1963), and Ira Levin's This Perfect Day (1970). Forster early on grasped the truth that the Machine creates its own politics, its own sociology, its own rationality, its own epistemology, its own axiolocy and, indeed, its own theology. Modern totalitarianism—the political phenomenon that [George] Woodcock sees as providing the historical impetus for dystopianism—would itself be impossible without a highly complex technological apparatus. In any case, by depicting in The Machine Stops a society that depends on the omnipotence of the Machine to realize the millennial dreams of a Bacon, a Bellamy, or a Wells, Forster may be said to have founded the first anti-technological dystopia. His mythos—the rebel rejecting a mechanized mega-civilization—is the typical dystopian mythos; his fear—the mechanical abolition of man—is their fear; and his alternative—a return to Nature—is their alternative. (pp. 91-2)