Forster's Other Cave: The Platonic Structure of "The Machine Stops"

Berman, Jeffrey. "Forster's Other Cave: The Platonic Structure of 'The Machine Stops.'" Extrapolation 17.2 (May 1976): 172-81.

E. M. Forster's use of the "cave" as a "setting for an entire underground universe, in which the basic living unit, expressed by the ironic simile of the 'cell of a bee,' remains irreconcilably antithetical to the organic . . . imagery" of the bee. Handles the story's "impassioned warnings against the growing nightmare of technological dehumanization" (173, 172).