In the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode “Crossover,” characters Kira and Bashir experience operational difficulties on their way home. Upon arriving at the eponymous space station, they find it to be a strange and terrible place.

Bashir is forced to work in the station’s ore processor, which had long been disabled on their home station. The two realize they are in a mirror universe, so they organize a revolt among the human workers to escape this station and return home, where the ore processor is merely history and the station is free for trade, shopping, and entertainment: a neoliberal dream fully cleansed of the working class who had been the mechanism of their delivery.

Productive work is rarely shown in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and when it is, it’s usually marked by slavery or some other form of coercion. The use of forced labor in the ore processing center, for example, is used to illustrate the brutality of the Cardassian civilization. In fact, much of modern speculative fiction, or SF, has been complicit in the repression of portrayals of workers and production from our social imaginary.