The Machine Stops feels somewhat prescient, but also feels like a genre of kids books I kept encountering in the late 70s/early 80s which were all about farm kids pitying the city folk and having to teach said city kids about how to survive in the 'real world'. Things like 'how to make bread', which was weird, because I grew up around hippies all of whom made their own bread as city folk, and none of the country folk I knew made bread!