These CDs will play in any CD player at home or in your car.

The Machine Stops

E. M. Forster 
(1879 - 1970)

Read by Elizabeth Klett

Run Time 1 Hour 20 Minutes in 2 Audio CDs
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories. The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine.

Chapter Titles:
The Air-Ship 
The Mending Apparatus 
The Homeless

  • Our Audiobooks are Complete and Unabridged (unless otherwise indicated)
  • Our Audiobooks are always read by real people, never by computers.
  • Please Note: These recorded readings are from the author's original works which are in the public domain. All recordings and artwork are in the public domain and there are no infringements or copyrights. Each track starts with "This is a LibriVox recording...."
  • Although Librivox has graciously made these recordings available to the public domain, they are not associated with the sale of this product.

Public domain books

A public-domain book is a book with no copyright, a book that was created without a license, or a book where its copyrights expired or have been forfeited.

In most countries the of copyright expires on the first day of January, 70 years after the death of the latest living author. The longest copyright term is in Mexico, which has life plus 100 years for all deaths since July 1928.

A notable exception is the United States, where every book and tale published before 1926 is in the public domain; American copyrights last for 95 years for books originally published between 1925 and 1978 if the copyright was properly registered and maintained.