The ultimate future city: Part 2, the estates
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
Scarcely had logorrheac author Isaac Asimov finished The Caves of Steel when he was at work on its counterpoise, The Naked Sun.
Original Doubleday cover, 1956
For this police procedural murder mystery, he reunited
With their underpopulated worlds resting on a positronic robot economy, their energy production per human was thousands of times that of the Earth. And it was the amount of energy a single human could produce that dictated military potential, standard of living, happiness, and all besides. Page 13.
In such a world, crime is pointless, and therefore dies of starvation:
‘We have no police force on Solaria. … No crime, you see. Our population is tiny and widely scattered. There is no occasion for crime, therefore no occasion for police.’ Page 36.
How then do they maintain a society?
Hath not a robot eyes?
Hath not a robot hands?
Baley said, ‘what is the population?’
‘Twenty thousand, partner Elijah.’
Baley accepted that for a moment, then he said mildly, ‘You mean twenty million, don’t you? … How much of the planet do they occupy?’
‘All the fertile portions.’
‘For twenty thousand people?’
‘There are also some two hundred million working robots, partner Elijah.’ Page 26.
Like many an antebellum plantation, Solaria’s economy is technological, maintained by armies of robots:
We’re the workforce
‘Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex. For instance, even the most poorly-off humans on
With all this wealth, housing consumption rises exponentially:
“It is customary to devote a single room to a single purpose. This is the library. There is also a music-room, a gymnasium, a kitchen, a bakery, a dining room, a machine shop, various robot repair and testing rooms, and two bedrooms …” Page 33
Shades of the McMansion?
While Baley (and through him, Asimov) obviously disapproves of all this consumption, he cannot quite bring himself to vocalize it, for his own logic makes him ask, If space is ample, and housing is inexpensive, why not have special-purpose rooms?
1956’s vision of the expanding American home
In this, he was prefiguring one of America’s dominant housing trends of the last half-century, the evolving modern home:
Rooms are more specialized. Today’s modern house has the extra bathroom, the downstairs half-bath, the exercise room, the home office, home theater, game room. Our ancestors would have been agog at our self-indulgence.
To the big screen and beyond!
Houses are more technological. Today’s home has low-flow toilets and showers, setback thermostats and climate zones, multiple phone lines, a fast broadband pipe, and a juiced up electrical system to handle the amperage required to run all the high-tech gear that decorates those specialized rooms.
The logical end state of such expansion and specialization is the personal villa. In this Asimov was, wittingly or not, recalling the great Roman imperial palaces like Tiberius’s Villa Jovis:
If Tiberius didn’t like you, he threw you over the cliff
or Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli:
A complex built by and for one man … and his lover
All the comforts of Rome, without the bother of Rome
In the modern era, that quest for a personal universe was pursued by William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
Hearst consciously echoed the Romans:
The
[If you ever have the chance, all these places are really worth touring, in as much depth as your itinerary will allow you to spare.]
With all this distance comes a curious cultural retreat:
‘Why is it the Solarians object to seeing one another [in person]?’
‘It follows inevitably. We have huge estates. An estate ten thousand square miles in area is not uncommon, although the largest ones contain considerable unproductive land … In any case, it is the size of an estate, more than anything else, that determines a man’s position in society. And one property of a large estate is this: You can wander about in it almost aimlessly with little or no danger of entering a neighbor’s territory and thus encountering your neighbor. … In short, a Solarian takes pride in not meeting his neighbor. The desire not to do so led to the development of ever more perfect viewing equipment, and as the viewing equipment grew better there was less and less need ever to see one’s neighbor. It was a reinforcing cycle, a kind of feedback.’ Page 104
That in turn leads to a drop in the birth rate, and in fact to a stable population:
‘You did live in the same mansion? I thought – ‘
‘Of course we did. We were married. But I had my quarters and he had his. He had a very important career which took much of his time and I had my own work. We viewed each other whenever necessary.’ Page 53
We see this demographic plateau even today; with increasing wealth and consumption come a decline in the birth rate. The richer a country, the more slowly it grows (except for immigration), and the more it needs a workforce class:
‘The human-robot ratio in any economy that has accepted robot labor tends continuously to increase despite any laws that are passed to prevent it. The increase is slowed, but never stopped. At first the human population increases, but the robot population increases much more quickly. Then, after a certain critical point is reached the human population begins to decline. A planet approaches a true social stability.’ Page 114
From the not-entirely-awful movie, I, Robot
That statement is in quotes because it comes from one of Asimov’s characters, a self-taught Solarian sociologist. When Baley returns to Earth and reports to his chief, he comments that space and wealth are as much a dead end as overcrowding and poverty:
‘We’re Solaria inside out. They retreated into isolation from one another. We retreated into isolation from the Galaxy. They are at the dead end of their inevitable estates. We are at the dead end of the underground Cities. They’re leaders without followers, only robots who can’t talk back. We’re followers without leaders, only enclosing Cities to keep us safe.’ Page 199.
Back in the 1950’s, that was what they saw for the cities: overpopulation at one end, sterility at the other.
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