When the narrator of “The Story of a Panic” boasts that he “can tell a story without exaggerating” and then unfolds a tale about a boy who obviously is visited by Pan and who finally bounds away to join the goat-god, the readers know that they must themselves inform the gaps of information. Inskip finds it “right” to repeat Miss Beaumont’s conversation about a “great dream” to his employer, the reader correctly places the tutor on the side of unimaginative human, rather than in the lineup of Dryads to which the young lady will repair. In “Other Kingdom,” for example, when Mr. Perhaps “The Machine Stops,” a science-fiction tale about a world managed by a computerlike Machine that warns men to “beware of first-hand ideas,” was at the time of its writing (1909) the most fantastic of Forster’s short fiction, but its portrayal of radio, television, and telephones with simultaneous vision seems to have been simply farsighted.įorster frequently uses a narrator who is so insensitive that he ironically enhances the perception of the reader. Whether or not his life is permanently changed, the transformed character can never be the same again after a glimpse of the Elysian Fields, and he is henceforth suspect to contemporary mortals.įorster termed his short stories “fantasies,” and when the discerning reader can determine the point at which the real and the fantastic intersect, he will locate the epiphany, at the same time flexing his own underused imaginative muscles. The transformation resulting from the experience comes about through some kind of magic that transports him through time-backward or forward-or through space-to Mt.

Qualifications for experiencing this epiphany include a questioning mind, an active imagination, and a dissatisfaction with conventional attitudes. Forster story features a protagonist who is allowed a vision of a better life, sometimes momentarily only. The words “celestial” and “eternal” are especially significant because a typical E. All of Forster’s best-known and most anthologized stories appeared first in two collections, The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

The machine stops short story