The opening story, The Air-Ship, presents a subterranean future where humanity lives isolated in hexagonal cells, entirely dependent on the all-governing Machine. People rarely move their bodies, communicating solely through blue plates while devoting their lives to the production and exchange of second-hand ideas. Vashti, a conventional lecturer and devoted follower of the Book of the Machine, is summoned by her rebellious son Kuno, who has dared to visit the surface of the earth on foot. Kuno describes his terrifying and exhilarating ascent through a long-abandoned ventilation shaft, where he rediscovered the forgotten sense of space and the physical reality of the natural world.
Despite Vashti's horror at his blasphemies and her own deep-seated fear of direct experience, she eventually travels across the globe to visit him. Kuno warns her that the Machine is failing and that he has been threatened with Homelessness, the death penalty of exposure to the outer air. Vashti dismisses his warnings as youthful nonsense and returns to her sheltered routine of lectures and electronic communication, firmly believing in the eternal omnipotence of the Machine.
Years later, the system begins to break down in subtle ways. The artificial music sighs with human pain, the fruit grows mouldy, the bathwater stinks, and finally, the sleeping apparatus fails. Panic spreads as the communication network collapses entirely. Vashti's cell door opens to reveal a frantic, terrified crowd in the dark tunnels, fighting and dying as the machinery ruptures around them. In her final moments of terror, she escapes her cell and reunites with Kuno in the ruined tunnel.
Together, they share a poignant realization as the artificial civilization finally ends. They mourn the centuries of wrong against the human body, the loss of physical sensation, and the blind worship of a machine that ultimately sought to destroy them. As an air-ship crashes through the gallery, they catch their final glimpse of the untainted sky, confident that humanity has learned its lesson and that the hidden people on the surface will endure.
The volume also contains other tales, including The Point of It, which follows a man named Michael whose life of comfort, compromise, and mild sympathy leads him inexorably toward a sterile afterlife of endless old age. Interspersed with reflections on the decay of the heroic edge and the tragedy of soft lives, Forster examines how human experience hardens or liquefies the soul.
Another piece, Mr. Andrews, describes the journey of two very different souls toward the Gate of Heaven. A respectable English civil servant and a violent soldier from Salonika discover that their earthly dogmas dissolve at the threshold, and their shared moment of selfless grace is the only thing of true value they bring into eternity.
Finally, The Story of the Siren recounts a tale told in a blue Mediterranean grotto about a man who saw the Siren and was destroyed by the terrible burden of absolute knowledge. Through these interconnected fables and realistic sketches, Forster continuously questions the price of comfort and the enduring power of untamed nature.
