Science fiction has always been a tool for processing life on Earth. Norwegian sci-fi expert Karl Kristian Swane Bambini has said that the space-bound genre is well placed to “interrogate and reimagine real-world economic disparities”.
He gives the examples of, among other things, the 2013 blockbuster Elysium, wherein healthcare is only accessible off-world, to people with spaceships, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990s Mars trilogy of novels, which opposes the egalitarianism of a Martian society to Earth’s capitalist dystopia.
