As fiction, its awkward and too message-driven, but the message, that technological society is corrupting humans and doomed to collapse, seems to be decades ahead of its time. Check this out:

Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

I remember encountering that idea only a few years ago and thinking it was a great insight... but was Forster really ahead, or are we behind? In 1895, "The Time Machine" showed humans turned stupid and feeble after ages of technological coddling. In 1847, Wuthering Heights had a powerful critique of civilization hidden behind the love story, and was much better as fiction. Even the Bible has predictions of catastrophe and critiques of progress. I remember a line something like, "Woe unto those who put house against house, and field against field, until there is no place." Or from Ecclesiastes 5:11, "When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof?" And of course Daniel Quinn has argued that even the Eden myth is anti-civ.

Im wondering if were getting anywhere. Maybe in 100 or 1000 years, someone will dig up a Derrick Jensen book and and marvel at how far ahead of its time it was, when really they understand less than the first tribe conquered by Ur. Forsters story has an optimistic ending: "Humanity has learnt its lesson." My position continues to be that we will not do so any time soon. Any learning on the level of culture is vapor that will be swept away by the next Empire as soon as the forests grow back, and the only way out is to somehow change our basic nature to make it impossible for our power to systematically exceed our wisdom. It would be ironic if we accomplished that by getting so dependent on technology that we became permanently too stupid to form large-scale societies.