A note before getting to the contents themselves: don't buy this edition. All of the works contained in this book are public domain and so you can find them online for free, and this edition is so rife with errors that spending money on it really isn't warranted. Even if you're the type that greatly prefers a physical copy of a book, you're better off looking for one that's been better edited.

On to the stories themselves. This book combines Forster's short story collection The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories with what is probably his most famous short work, The Machine Stops. The former is a mixed bag, but showcases Forster's range as a writer as well as his imagination. The latter is excellent, a science fiction story with a level of prescience unmatched by any other book I've read in the genre. Both are worth reading, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that Forster wasn't so straight-laced and by-the-numbers writer as his longer works would lead you to believe.

In The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories Forster gives us several tales with at least an element of the fantastic, with a few left open to interpretation. The Story of a Panic is a strange beast of a story that leaves the key event ambiguous, and the ending likewise. You can interpret it as a story of fantasy or even a science fiction story if you so choose. The Other Side of the Hedge is a religious allegory that isn't very subtle and that is probably the low point of this collection, but even it isn't bad: just obvious and not particularly memorable. The titular story The Celestial Omnibus captures some of the feeling of childlike wonder despite the protagonist not always reacting in a believably childlike way, and despite the ending it's a story to put a smile on your face. Other Kingdom goes lighter on the fantastic elements than most of the other stories in this collection but still has an ending that strongly suggests a fantastic occurrence. I found it to be the highlight of the collection (not including The Machine Stops). Not only does Other Kingdom establish an interesting cast of characters within only a few pages, but the narrator is an interesting one that isn't a pure observer and isn't a full participant either, his role made the story even more interesting for me. The Curate's Friend again features fantastic occurrences and furthermore brings to the fore aspects of classical Greek fantasy that has appeared in a couple of the previous stories. Finally The Road From Colonus again touches on the fantastic, but in a subtler way, and the ending leaves you questioning what the purpose of the brush with the fantastic was. There's a recurring element throughout these stories of a person stumbling upon (or being stumbled upon by) something that changes their perspective on life, allowing them to perceive things they couldn't before, or in a way they didn't before, but this enlightenment isn't something they are able to share with or explain to others. Their world is transformed, and those around them are incapable of understanding. In an interesting twist, however, this enlightenment is a bad thing as often as not. The shift in perspective comes with new burdens, or brings misfortune (whether that was the enlightener's intention or not is often left for us to question). It's an interesting theme to explore, and one not present in the other Forster works I've read.

The Machine Stops is the longest of the stories included in this thin volume and also my favorite. With this story Forster paints a future with humans dependent on technology, where people don't interact face-to-face anymore, where human imagination and the drives to explore, invent, and progress have atrophied thanks to material comforts. The technological advances Forster foresaw is staggering. Forster presents a dystopia similar to the film Wall-E, except Forster conceived of such a world an entire century before Pixar. Not only does The Machine Stop impress with its prescience, it's also a good story in its own right. Having created a machine to pamper them and take care of their every need, humanity puts itself in the care of the machine. Before long they have lost the original knowledge that went into the machine- it repairs itself, after all, so why bother maintaining an understanding of it- and eventually as the gulf of understanding widens the machine is treated as a divine entity. There are the rare few that try to exist outside of the machine, but the vast majority are complacent. This is the state of the world when the story begins, and although the outcome of such a story is predictable in broad strokes Forster constructs the details masterfully, and on the whole the structure and progression of the story is strong. Having read this, I can't help but wish Forster spent more of his career writing science fiction. Oh well, at least we have The Machine Stops, which I would recommend that everyone with a spare hour or two check out. ( )