Raanan Geberer: Are we becoming Solarians?
Back in 1986, when I was writing back-cover and inside-front cover copy for paperback science fiction books, I was chosen to write the promotional copy for Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation and Earth,” which dealt with several different planets and the civilizations that had sprung up on them.
One of these planets was called Solaria. Solaria had a very sparse population, with a small number of humans and large armies of robots working the humans’ estates. The peculiarity of the Solarian lifestyle was that the humans had a strange distaste for being in each others’ company.
In Solaria, all transactions and communications were done by means of two-way telecommunication by use of sophisticated television sets (while personal computers were already in use at the time, the internet was still about five years away). That, of course, included all trade and commerce.