Thanks for the link and heads up on this story I never heard of. You are so right about Lamb’s prediction gizmo:)

I avoid horror completely as well as works like Fahrenheit 451. In my youth things like the Scarlet Letter and Good Earth appealed, but no longer.

I accidentally bought a meaty spec fic book earlier this year, and while I devoured it, I avoided the author afterwards. Yes, it was a good, compelling, and gripping book, but that’s not what I’m after these days.

I am so drained day after day by what’s happening in the world around me, I want my pleasure reading to be like slipping into a warm cozy bath.

My biggest worry is the kind of stuff that’s been done already… both the brilliant, and the dross (and the stuff that’s so bad it becomes good and earns itself a cult following).

The very best speculative fiction is that which, many years on, becomes completely different in character… but still valid. Books like EM Forster’s short, ‘The Machine Stops’.

When I first read it as a schoolboy in the early sixties, it was sci-fi pure and simple. Most of it was about unheard of technology way into the future… even then… though it was already over fifty years after the book was written.
But today, that same book feels very different, particularly to a modern younger reader. Forster’s prescience is staggering, in just how much of what he describes has become commonplace in our modern connected world.

Nowadays, the book can very easily be mistaken for a recently written steampunk tale, with today’s technology, but with a quaint old fashioned twist – The book pre-dates TV. Even simple telephony was in its infancy. The telegraph was more commonly used for long distance communications, yet Forster accurately predicts the internet, or something very similar.

The book’s story and its message still work, but the things which seemed so futuristic and incredible back in ’63 are now used every day by all of us… How must they have seemed to a reader when the novella was first published in 1909?… Yes… That’s over a century ago.

Check it out for yourselves…
( http://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.html )… It’s an easy read, it’s short, and it’s free… and it shows all of us how ‘speculative’ should be done, even after all these years.