SCIENCE FICTION, through its dystopian tales, has often explored alienation at work. Recently, with The Substance, Mickey 17 and the second season of Severance, this theme is back in the spotlight, taking new paths to question the dispossession of self linked to work in productivist societies.

Science fiction has always had a close link with the theme of alienation at work. As far back as 1921, Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. featured artificial workers condemned to work on assembly lines in factories in the future (the distant year 2000). These synthetic slaves are referred to as “robots” (from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labour), a term that has entered the jargon of science fiction. 

In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis depicted workers transformed into cogs in the industrial machine of the future. Charlie Chaplin did the same in 1936 in Modern Times, which itself incorporated elements of science fiction and literally made the worker, as Marx and Engels had written as early as 1848, “a mere appendage of the machine.”