FICTIONAL FIGURE
Solarians
The human residents of Solaria — twenty thousand people whose fully robot-served existence has produced a culture that cannot bear physical human presence. The canonical fictional portrait of automation dependence at civilizational scale.
The Solarians are Asimov's fullest fictional case study of what happens to a human population when automation removes every friction of cooperative life. Each Solarian lives on a vast estate with hundreds of robots. In-person contact is culturally taboo; communication happens via three-dimensional 'viewing' (a holographic medium). Reproduction is genetically managed. The population is stable at around twenty thousand and slowly declining. The Solarians live three hundred years, pursue solitary intellectual interests, and regard Earthers' crowded existence with revulsion. They are Asimov's longest-lived and most materially comfortable human characters and also his most cautionary.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Solarian temperament is depicted with real specificity. They are not stupid or cruel; they are thoughtful, polite, and (by their standards) content. Their intellectual lives are rich within narrow bounds. What they lack is the capacity for the kinds of cognition that require physical presence: embodied collaboration, emergency coordination, shared physical work. When Elijah Baley arrives to investigate a