The Machine Stops
Glossary
"
- "Beware of first-hand ideas!"
- The rallying cry of an unnamed lecturer, quoted at length in Chapter 3, who argues that direct observation is a "gross foundation" for philosophy and that ideas should be "second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand." His speech, using the French Revolution as his example, crystallizes the culture of total mediation that the Machine has produced and triggers the story's second great development, the re-establishment of religion.
- Related: The Machine, Vashti, Central Committee
- "Man is the measure"
- Kuno's private discovery, made by pacing the platforms outside his room until he recovers "the meaning of 'Near' and 'Far'": that distance and value should be judged by what a human body can reach on its own, not by what the Machine's trains and air-ships can reach for it. The phrase becomes his justification for climbing the shaft against every social prohibition.
- Related: Kuno, The Machine
A
- Air-ship
- The vessel Vashti takes across the globe to visit Kuno, a relic of an earlier civilization kept running mostly out of inertia — "it was kept up, because it was easier to keep it up than to stop it." Ships crisscross the sky on a fixed, empty schedule since rapid travel became pointless once "the earth was exactly alike all over." An air-ship crashing into a ruined wharf delivers the story's final blow.
- Related: Vashti, Vomitory
C
- Central Committee
- The nominal governing body that publishes the Book and announces developments like the abolition of respirators, though the narrator insists it merely yields to "some invincible pressure" already latent in the Machine rather than truly directing it. Individual complaints are never received directly by the Central Committee, only forwarded through subordinate committees like that of the Mending Apparatus.
- Related: The Book, The Machine, Mending Apparatus
E
- Egression-permit
- The Machine-issued license required to legally visit the surface of the earth wearing a respirator, obtained through the vomitories. Kuno leaves the underground city without one, climbing an unauthorized ventilation shaft instead — the transgression that first draws the Committee's attention to him.
- Related: Homelessness, Respirator, Vomitory, Kuno
- Euthanasia
- The Machine-sanctioned, voluntary alternative to natural death, granted to citizens (including, at times, a despondent Vashti) so long as the overall death-rate does not exceed the birth-rate. Its apparatus later fails along with everything else, and "pain reappeared among men" for the first time.
- Related: Homelessness, The Machine, Central Committee
H
- Homelessness
- The Machine's capital punishment: expulsion to the surface of the earth without protection, which "means death" because "the victim is exposed to the air, which kills him." Kuno is threatened with it after leaving his cell without an Egression-permit; by the story's end he predicts that the surviving surface-dwellers, "today... the Homeless," will inherit the world once the Machine finally stops.
- Related: Kuno, Egression-permit, Euthanasia, The Great Rebellion
K
- Kuno
- Vashti's son, who lives on the opposite side of the earth and rebels against the Machine's total mediation of experience. He forces his way up an abandoned ventilation shaft to the surface, is nearly killed there by the Mending Apparatus's worm-like agents, and is condemned as unfit — "His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on." He alone predicts, and is proved right about, the Machine's final collapse.
- Related: Vashti, Homelessness, The Mending Apparatus, Wessex
R
- Respirator
- The breathing apparatus required to survive briefly on the earth's poisoned surface, obtainable (with an Egression-permit) for sanctioned visits. In Chapter 3 respirators are abolished entirely, on the grounds that visiting the surface for "mere curiosity" is vulgar and "unproductive of ideas" — a step that seals humanity permanently underground.
- Related: Egression-permit, Vomitory, Kuno
T
- The Book (of the Machine)
- A single physical book kept by every inhabitant's reading-desk, published by the Central Committee, containing "instructions against every possible contingency" — which button to press for any need. Vashti treats it as scripture, kissing it three times and murmuring "O Machine! O Machine!"; its ritual use marks the re-establishment of religion described in Chapter 3.
- Related: The Machine, Central Committee, Undenominational Mechanism
- The Great Rebellion
- An earlier uprising against the Machine, referenced only in passing by Vashti, whose participants were extruded to the surface and left to die visibly near the vomitories as a deterrent — "a few crawled away, but they perished, too—who can doubt it?"
- Related: Homelessness, Vomitory
- The Machine
- The vast, planet-spanning system that houses, feeds, isolates, and connects every remaining human being underground. It began as a human invention — Kuno insists "Men made it, do not forget that" — but by the story's climax it is worshipped as a god, its Book kissed and its name invoked in ritual ("O Machine! O Machine!"). Its final, silent breakdown is the story's central catastrophe.
- Related: The Book, Vashti, Kuno, The Mending Apparatus
- The Mending Apparatus
- The system responsible for repairing the Machine itself, encountered by Kuno on the surface as blind, worm-like agents that drag him and a companion back underground and re-seal the breach he made. By Chapter 3 the Mending Apparatus is itself reported broken and beyond repair, the first domino in the Machine's total collapse.
- Related: The Machine, Kuno, Central Committee
U
- Undenominational Mechanism
- The minimum creed of Machine-worship that all citizens are expected to accept once religion re-establishes itself in disguised form; those who fall short of it "lived in danger of Homelessness." The word "religion" itself is carefully avoided even as prayer, ritual, and persecution return in substance.
- Related: The Book, The Machine, Homelessness
V
- Vashti
- The story's central consciousness, a lecturer who lives contentedly in her hexagonal cell, sustaining a wide circle of "ideas" entirely at second or tenth hand through the Machine. She is horrified by direct sunlight, human touch, and open air, and only leaves her room because her son Kuno summons her — a visit she considers "a disastrous waste of time."
- Related: Kuno, The Machine, The Book
- Vomitory
- One of the surface-level openings from which air-ships launch and through which permitted travelers ascend to the earth's surface — the only legal way out of the underground cities, in contrast to Kuno's illicit ventilation shaft. Bones of those exiled after the Great Rebellion are left visible around the vomitories "for our edification," per Vashti.
- Related: Respirator, Egression-permit, The Great Rebellion, Homelessness
W
- Wessex
- The English region where Kuno's ventilation shaft emerges onto the surface, once "an important state" whose king Ælfrid overthrew the Danes. Kuno's memory of "the hills of Wessex" as he dies becomes his and Vashti's shared image of a human life recaptured outside the Machine.
- Related: Kuno, Vashti