At the start of Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation, the young, gifted mathematician Gaal Dornick arrives on Trantor to accept an appointment at Streeling University. The conditions of his employment contract are not disclosed to readers, but it is relatively clear that this is what would later be labelled a standard employment relationship; Dornick will not be poorly remunerated for contract work while he puts in his time with the hopes of one day being converted from a contingent worker to a tenure-track professor with some say in how the academy is governed.
Upon arrival on the planet, the mathematician flags down a taxicab. The driver isn’t a gig worker, slavish to an app, doesn’t need to self-censor or beg for a five-star rating, and seems to enjoy the stability of a middle-class lifestyle. The galactic empire may have been on the verge of collapse, but the typical employment contract appears to echo the benefits of a broader social one.
Politics was precarious in Trantor, but employment was not.
This is largely representative of how workers and workplaces were long depicted in Science Fiction. There was a broad assumption that the normative employment relationship—which can arguably be traced to the late 1800s with a proper birth just after the Second World War—would continue to be a defining feature of paid labour in much of the Western world.
Science Fiction told its readers that employment was stable, would continue to be stable, and consequently usually gave short shrift to stories that centred workers’ rights.
Over the past twenty years, the rise of precarious employment—characterized by temporary contracts, part-time or gig work, lack of job security, and minimal social benefits—has reshaped the Science Fiction landscape, as it re-centres workers and workplaces in a way not seen since the heyday of utopian literature in the 1880s.
The questions being tackled by Science Fiction have—by observational necessity—returned to the genre’s proletarian roots.
Precarious work and its related employment statuses are inspiring a labour-rights-focused vein of Science Fiction that is welcome, necessary, and should be celebrated.
The Roots of Science Fiction as a Working-Class Genre
The existence of the standard capitalist employment relationship evolved over decades—as did Science Fiction. They were shaped by the same societal forces, and born of the same milieu.
From the early 1800s onwards, as mechanized production replaced agrarian economies in the quickly industrializing world, workers moved from farms to cities, and began to trade their hours of labour for wages, mostly in factories. Those affected by these rapidly changing living conditions and environments began to speculate about the end-points of these trends.
Many have argued that the progenitor of Science Fiction is Mary Shelley and her 1818 novel Frankenstein, but at the risk of being contrarian and provocative, we’re going to suggest that the genre’s lineage instead begins with Karl Marx.
Within a few years of the 1867 publication of Das Kapital, there was a flowering of utopian fiction: Annie Denton Cridge’s Man’s Rights; Or, How Would You Like It? (1870), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890), Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890), and William Dean Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria (1894). These novels focused on working conditions and imagined alternatives to existing, exploitative employment relationships.
Much as it is today, rapidly progressing technological advancements were creating new types of work and consequently new types of workers. This disruption was fundamentally restructuring the relationship that workers had with their labour, and this was reflected in literature and social activism. One could even suggest that the labour union movement of the 1800s was a practical reflection of Science Fiction’s philosophy.
Over the decades, the relationship between those who owned the means of production and those who lacked capital—workers—became more entrenched. In more economically advantaged countries this was structured around wages and workplace hierarchies. Legal systems and government policy evolved to enforce contracts and to institutionalize this exchange of labour.
Probably the most famous Science Fiction author at the turn of the century was H.G. Wells, an avowed socialist whose primary preoccupations were with the plight of workers. The conditions of working people are in the foreground of novels such as When the Sleeper Awakes, In the Days of the Comet, and The Time Machine. Wells’ favourite of all his own books Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul may not have been Science Fiction, but it is about socialist themes and proletarian musings.
Science Fiction became codified—and increasingly commercialized—in the first two decades of the 20th Century, at the same time that labour legislation in the United States was entrenching contractualist approaches to employment relations. The Golden Age of Science Fiction is often said to have started in 1937 when John W. Campbell Jr. became editor of Astounding Science Fiction—and this happened just as the Norris–La Guardia Act of 1932, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 were coming into effect.
The stability of the standard capitalist employment relationship in America in the 1950s and 1960s made it easy to imagine that questions of workplace conditions were largely resolved, and all that remained was for the details to be worked out through negotiation and contractualism. Consequently, as Mark Fisher explains in his book Capitalist Realism, there was a propagandistic value to the depiction of work being standardized and stable. These values were largely unquestioned in Science Fiction during a formative era for the genre.
This period of increasing employment stability for the majority of people in the global West is reflected in the reduction of stories about organizing and radicalizing workers. The pulp magazine era repurposed the genre’s utopian impulses into marketable tropes (space conquest, alien encounters, and heroic individualism) that catered to entertainment rather than the place of the worker within the society. The fact that at this time the vast majority of Science Fiction authors in the Western world belonged to the dominant and privileged white ethnic majority also contributed to the underrepresentation of class-conscious stories within the genre. Many non-white workers who did not have the benefits of stable employment relationships were also excluded from the major Science Fiction magazines by editors whose biases are well documented.
Pulp narratives often foregrounded technological triumph and personal adventure, sidelining the collective political visions of their predecessors. In this process, the genre’s original emancipatory ethos was diluted, transformed from a tool of critique into an instrument of spectacle.
The mass production of pulp Science Fiction thus marked a turning point in which socialist utopianism was not only marginalized, but replaced by a cultural logic of capitalist consumption.
And so it remained for half a century.
Employment Precarity Drives Workers Rights in Science Fiction
Precarious employment has roots in earlier labour arrangements but has become more prevalent in the wake of increased globalization and the emergence of neo-liberal hypercapitalism. Of course, employment has always contained elements of precarity, especially in less economically advantaged countries and for members of equity-deserving groups.
Typical depictions of labour grievances in the 1970s and 1980s included extremely negative depictions such as the officious “Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Thinking Persons” in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) as well as the dangerous and violent police strikes in Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) and Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987). Even more extreme was Brian Hannant’s The Time Guardian (1987), in which evil cyborg trade unionists travel back in time to exterminate freedom-loving humanity.
In the waning years of the 20th Century, some prescient Science Fiction authors began to take note of the erosion of the standard capitalist employment relationship, and the genre shifted rapidly in ways that are rarely discussed. One of the first examples of this shift can be found in the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s—which reflected the decade’s increasing corporate power and wealth inequality. While cyberpunk was sometimes little more than the aesthetics of mirrorshades, computing technology, and leather jackets, we would suggest that the most important aspect of cyberpunk is class consciousness.
In more recent years, a number of techno-optimist Canadian authors such as Cory Doctorow, Karl Schroeder, and Madeline Ashby have crafted a small subgenre that responds to the cyberpunk era’s depiction of employment with tales of technologically driven labour organizing. While cyberpunk often seemed to despair about the erosion of workers’ rights, what we’d term “Canadian post-cyberpunk” begins to imagine solidarity-driven ways to assert such rights.
By the turn of the century, works like Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000)—clearly informed by real-world trends towards employment precarity—featured workers’ collectives in worlds where formal jobs are scarce. These depictions of precarity highlighted the instability and exploitation that arise when social systems fail, emphasizing themes of economic vulnerability, survival, and the unequal burden placed on the urban poor.
Although not directly tied to the problems of precarious employment, it’s worth noting that in the 1990s, both of the major televised space opera franchises of the day had overtly pro-worker episodes. “By Any Means Necessary” (1994) features a dockworker’s strike on Babylon 5, which is depicted as entirely justified, and two years later Deep Space Nine’s “Bar Association” (1996) depicts worker-led organizing at an exploitative service-industry employer.
The precarious employment of sex workers, who are often subject to abuse and unsafe working conditions, was tackled by forward-looking Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. Laura Resnick’s alternate history We Are Not Amused (1992) featured the depiction of a labour union for sex workers, while Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms (1994) introduced the euphemistically named Seamstress’ Guild, which acted to protect its members from abuse. This theme would continue to increase in visibility within the genre, with Madeline Ashby’s Company Town (2015) offering one of the most technically accurate depictions of a business union in genre work.
One of the defining factors in the rise of precarious employment over the past fifteen years has been the advent of gig-economy apps. The ubiquity of apps such as Uber (launched in 2008), Taskrabbit (launched in 2011), and Hampr (the laundry app launched in 2023) have redefined employment for the worse. Governing employment relationships via geolocated online devices and microtransactions creates an omnipresent panopticon workplace where the worker is disempowered; it’s a technologically driven change that comes straight out of dystopian Science Fiction. As it was in the 1800s, technology is creating new types of work and consequently new types of workers, and Science Fiction is interpreting and reflecting these changes. The negative consequences of these apps—and the possible extreme end-state of this erosion of employment stability—are often satirized in Science Fiction, such as the TV series Black Mirror (episodes such as “Nosedive” and “Smithereens”) and S.B. Divya’s novel Machinehood.
An exemplar of this recent surge in stories about workers organizing in the face of precarity is Boots Riley’s 2018 movie Sorry to Bother You. The film depicts grassroots organizing in the face of corporate exploitation, as the protagonist Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is torn between the empty promises of the ultra-wealthy and the struggles of his gig economy colleagues. Through satire and surrealism, it underscores the ways in which labour movements can challenge capitalist structures, emphasizing solidarity as a necessary force for justice and worker empowerment.
Over the past two decades, there has been an increase in the depictions of worker and union organizing in Science Fiction. These depictions are arguably more well-informed about workplace issues—and the strategies that workers have to assert their rights—than earlier offerings. In an era where unhinged corporate hypercaptialism is running rampant, the genre is reflecting a public unease with the erosion of workers’ rights.
Conclusion
In recent decades, many Science Fiction authors have returned to the genre’s radical and utopian roots—not only as a genre of imagination, but as a vessel for class critique and worker solidarity.
The rise of precarious employment has forced both society and its speculative storytellers to confront the erosion of stable employment and its implications for social cohesion, autonomy, and justice.
These authors are once again centring the lived realities of workers and interrogating the systems that govern employment. This renewed focus is not just timely—it feels essential.
Science Fiction, born in struggle, is finding its working-class voice again.
© 2025 Amanda Wakaruk and Olav Rokne
