Sometimes the genre of science fiction can offer commentary about our contemporary society...even when the setting is far off in both time and space. In light of last weekend's violence in Charlottesville, Virginia when an outside group of white supremacists demonstrated there over the University of Virginia's planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue and one of them ran over counter-protesters, killing a young woman and injuring several others, I thought I'd pick a short story highlighting the theme of bigotry. And Isaac Asimov, the great author of the Foundation series, provided one with Strikebreaker...from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories #19 (1957)(DAW Books, 1989)...
It is far into the distant future and humanity has settled the galaxy far and wide. On a small planetoid called Elsevere, every cubic foot of space is being utilized...with recycling of everything an absolute requirement for sustainability. But there has developed a problem...growing into a planetary crisis...and Steven Lamorak has arrived from Earth to investigate. In a nutshell, the society on Elsevere has been divided into strict castes according to the jobs that the people perform. Lowest and most shunned is the person (and family) responsible for operating the machinery that processes all of the waste (including excrement and the dead) and recycles it for consumption: an indispensable job. The operator, Ragusnik, has had enough of his and his family's forced isolation from society and has declared a strike until they are allowed equal access to Elsevere. So the waste is accumulating to dangerous levels...and it is up to Lamorak to try and negotiate a solution. The irony is that Ragusnik is no different from anyone else and his job only involves pushing buttons and turning dials: he never even remotely gets close to the waste that others shun him for being involved with...
Strikebreaker is about how a society can make divisions among itself that can seem for its own members to be important to its function but to an outside observer seem completely arbitrary and discriminatory. The extremists wanting to exacerbate racial divisions in our own country may think that they are "saving" their society...but to any reasonable person observing them, they come across as narrow-minded bigots. Seeing what's been recently happening in Charlottesville, Virginia should serve as a wake-up call to us...
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