I’m trying to help someone else out. It has a “Logan’s Run” sort of feel to it. Here is is info in its entirety:
I have been trying for several months to identify the title and author of a short science fiction story I read several years ago in an anthology. I remember the plot vividly. It takes place in a world of the future in which all inhabitants live below the surface in what seem like pods. Their nourishment and other material needs are supplied to them by some unseen and benign central mechanism. The pods are also connected with each other so that the inhabitants may communicate at least by audio, if not video, without leaving their pods. In fact, they have parties by simply arranging to meet “online” at a given time. Nobody ever leaves his or her pod, and nobody wants to. Everyone seems quite content with this existence. The dramatic tension revolves around the two characters in the story - a mother and son. The mother is thoroughly satisfied with her existence; the son is continually wondering what is “up there” on the surface. The common wisdom is that it is uninhabitable, an alien and threatening environment. The mother regularly admonishes her son to forget about that part of their world, urging him to enjoy the pleasures available in their pods. The climax of the story has the son finally taking the risk to find the way to the surface and discovering that it is in fact a habitable, beautiful place.
Sounds like the SDMB!
Also sounds a lot like the movie “The Matrix.”
I have no idea what the story is, although it uses a theme that’s been in several stories i’ve read.
I really came in here to say that CalMeacham’s post is the funniest thing I’ve read today!
Does the main character try to understand distance by walking places, and understand the concept of near and far? At the end, he reaches the surface but the “white worms” drag him back. Finally the central mechanism fails, the world falls apart, and he reaches his mother on foot somehow, through the disaster of the place falling apart.
I connect this with the title “Lair of the White Worm” but a quick web search comes up with a different story with that title, by Bram Stoker.
Your description matches exactly a story I read in college in a sci-fi course. I’ll see if I have the anthology back at home.
Title: The Machine Stops
Author: (name escapes me)
I read this in an old anthology. Great story!
I think we have a winner. That sounds like it.
Tanks a bunch!
SFDB says the author is E. M. Forster.
I believe the author of this was none other than Rudyard Kipling.
Nope, nope. E.M. Forster it is. It’s in my Treasury of Science Fiction Classics, published in 1954 (the story itself, the book says, was published in 1928, in The Eternal Moment and Other Stories)
Hell yeah.
Beautiful naked man was dying, of course, not beatiful naked man. I previewed that, too. sigh Sorry.
Lux, thanks for the correction. Now, I’d just like to know why it’s so stuck in my memory as being connected to Kipling. I remember reading the story in a paperback collection as a teenager, and being impressed with it because of the year it was written. Let me be sure this is the story I remember: does the protagonist at some point tell the person he’s communicating with that he’s built up his strength by holding his pillow at arm’s-length for hours? And, at some point, do the characters discuss the recent destruction of a provocative statue entitled Nigger In Flames?
He did build up his strength like that, and by hanging from his arms and pacing, but I didn’t see anything about the statue that you mentioned.