Spacer (Asimov)

In Isaac Asimov's Foundation/Empire/Robot series, the Spacers were the first humans to emigrate to space. About a millennium thereafter, they severed political ties with Earth, and embraced low population growth as a means for a high standard of living, in combination with using large numbers of robots as servants. At the same time, they also became militarily dominant over Earth.

Asimov's novels chronicle the gradual deterioration of the Spacer worlds and the disappearance of robots from human society. The exact details vary from book to book, and in at least one case—the radioactive contamination of Earth—later scientific discoveries forced Asimov to retcon his own future history. The general pattern, however, is as follows:

In the vague period between Asimov's near-future robot stories (of the type collected in I, Robot) and his Robot novels, emigrants from Earth establish colonies on fifty worlds, the first being Aurora, the last Solaria, and the Hall of the Worlds located on Melpomenia, the nineteenth. Sociological forces possibly related to their sparse populations and dependence on robot labor lead to the collapse of most of these worlds; their dominance is replaced by new, upstart colonies known as "Settler" worlds. Unlike their Spacer predecessors, the Settlers detested robots, and so by the time of the Empire novels robotics is almost an unknown science.

In Foundation and Earth, Golan Trevize becomes the first Galactic visitor to these worlds in thousands of years. With coordinates supplied by a scholar on Comporellon, he finds Aurora deserted of human life, Melpomenia having lost most of its atmosphere, and Solaria sparsely inhabited by the genetically-modified hemaphroditic descendants of the original Spacers.

Roger MacBride Allen's Caliban trilogy portrays several years in the history of Inferno, a planet where Spacers recruit Settlers to rebuild the collapsing ecology.

Asimov's novel Nemesis hints that the Spacers may have been descendants of human beings selected by a non-human intelligence for their mental characteristics. However, except for a brief mention in Forward the Foundation, the Nemesis plotline is entirely unlinked with the rest of Asimov's science-fiction canon. (The internal logic of the Robot-Empire-Foundation saga demands that robots be present on Earth prior to the Spacer worlds' colonization, yet Nemesis contains no robots, making the continuity difficult to accept.)

In a somewhat similar vein, Mark W. Tiedemann's "Robot Mystery" trilogy also portrays the Spacers as a group genetically distinct from Earthpeople and their Settler descendants. Tiedemann's trilogy, set between The Robots of Dawn and its sequel Robots and Empire, attempts to update Asimov's work to reflect more recent scientific and science-fictional speculation, for example explaining the lack of nanotechnology in Asimov's robot-ridden society. According to Tiedemann's Aurora (2002), the cumulative effects of genetic alterations (due partly to nanotech devices since abandoned) have separated Spacers from the rest of humanity, to such an extent that the word "human" in the Three Laws of Robotics may no longer apply to them.

In his Lucky Starr series of juvenile (or in modern parlance, "young adult") novels, Asimov describes the "Sirians" in terms which resemble those for the Spacers.

External link

*The Rise and the Fall of the Spacers