Taboos in Science Fiction

I got to thinking about taboos in Science Fiction recently. Not the sort that SF has so famously challenged, starting with Stranger in a Strange Land and Dangerous Visions back in the Sixties. That's become so mainstream that I can hardly think of a taboo that Game of Thrones didn't break. I'm thinking of the new taboos that authors invent to add depth to their worlds.

Isaac Asimov did this to good effect in a number of his stories. For example, in The Caves of Steel, it was unthinkable to speak to or acknowledge anyone in a public restroom. Sure, he described the Earth as crowded, but that detail brought home the buffers that people constructed to give themselves personal space when they no longer had any physical space. If only the people in today's restrooms who talk on their cellphones in meeting-room voices, oblivious of background noises and everyone's rolling eyes, would take a cue from that.

Asimov even raised his famous Laws of Robotics to the level of a taboo. Yes, they were built into the robots' programming at an engineering level, but the robots themselves talked about those prohibitions in visceral terms. They became disturbed at the notion that one of them could disobey orders, and when one witnessed a murder, it nearly had a nervous breakdown. That's more than engineering, that's a taboo. (Asimov also invented the profession of Robot Psychologist to convey that their complexity had reached nearly human levels.)

In Asimov's second robot novel, The Naked Sun (the title itself playing on the forbidden), the planet Solaria had an even odder taboo. On Solaria, the number of robots was so high and the amount of living space so vast that it became a status symbol to never come into the presence of another human, which in turn became a taboo. It was only acceptable to meet another person via video. The murder that was the centerpiece of the story shouldn't have happened because it was taboo to get close enough to another person to do it and just as unthinkable that one of the robots could have done it. After more than a year of Zoom meetings, I'm not sure that would come to pass, though I am seeing people have anxiety about getting out and mingling once again.

What other invented taboos in Science Fiction have you come across? I'd love to hear about your favorites. Write me at nl@lamp.works to tell me about them.