Some Light Spring Reading
The IdleGuy.com Librarian decided to take a break from heavier tomes, now that the weather is improving and April forecasts are fair. The three tiems for this month consist of two shorter works, Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" and "The Machine Stops"
by E. M. Forster, a novella-length sci-fi classic from 1909 (just imagine!), and one full-length novel, "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Free downloads are available for each below.
Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul’s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut–wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to a reality that may actually be evolving here in 2026. One of the greatest fiction writers of the past century, Vonnegut's probing and engaging stye produced ersatz sci-fi classics that received countless literary awards, critical praise and vast public appeal.
Major General Smedley D. Butler was a military hero of the first rank, the winner of two Medals of Honour, a true ‘fighting marine’ whose courage and patriotism could not be doubted. Yet he came to believe that the wars in which he and his men had fought and bled and died were all pre-planned conflicts, designed not so much to defend America as to bloat the balance sheets of US banks and corporations.
War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare.
After his retirement from the Marine Corps, Gen. Butler made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech on “War is a Racket“. The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a small book with the same title that was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., of New York. The booklet was also condensed in Reader’s Digest as a book supplement which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader’s Digest version, Lowell Thomas, the “as told to” author of Butler’s oral autobiographical adventures, praised Butler’s “moral as well as physical courage.“
"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 popular anthology Modern Short Stories. In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.
The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide its needs, predicted technologies similar to instant messaging the internet and other modern marvels are presented in a fascinating, deep construct from more than a century ago.
In the preface to his Collected Short Stories (1947), Forster wrote that "The Machine Stops" was intended as a rebuttal to one of the "earlier heavens" of H. G. Wells"; specifically his quasi-novel, A Modern Utopia, published in 1905. In contrast to Wells's political commentary, Forster points to the technology itself as the primary societal controlling force.
Added bonus: The Machine Stops audiobook.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1952)
War is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler (1935)
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)
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