The Quarantined Mind

“The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it’s something that made everything possible . . . . The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun

I was 15 years old the first time that I read Isaac Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun, the sequel to The Caves of Steel and the second of his science-fiction/mystery novels designed to prove that the two genres could co-exist comfortably in the same book.

At 15 I didn’t much like The Naked Sun. It seemed too far-fetched, even for a science fiction novel. The Caves of Steel — with its human beings living in massive, overpopulated underground cities that they never left — seemed plausible to me. I could imagine our world ending up that way, and it struck me as a logical continuation of the urbanization that started 5,000 years ago and has continued ever since.

But The Naked Sun takes civilization in the opposite direction. It supposes a colony of earth people who live on huge estates in near-total isolation from each other. They never talk to each other in person, but they communicate frequently through video devices. Husbands and wives tolerate each other’s presence for very brief times when reproduction is required but otherwise live in separate parts of their…