I read this novel long ago, maybe when I was 8 or 9. I’d almost completely forgotten it. It presaged the liberals’ wished-for perma-lockdown future.
Asimov portrays in The Naked Sun a world focused on avoiding physical contact with other people. The Solarians practice physical distancing, and interact with each other largely through technology. They live far from each other, spread out across a sparsely populated planet. People are taught from birth to avoid physical contact, and live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Face-to-face interaction (referred to in the book as “seeing”) is seen as a repugnant chore….Sex is only practiced for reproduction when replacement of a citizen is necessary, and is considered a chore even more repugnant than seeing. A character remarks that to be in the same room with another person is “most unpleasant…. I feel strongly as though something slimy were about to touch me.”[3]:113 A doctor has to “get hardened” to it….The Solarians’ phobia against in-person contact is so strong that a character commits suicide to avoid it.
Sound like any people you know? At least a lot of them are moving that direction for sure. Not bad for 1956.