Some think that the purpose of science fiction is to predict the future, but those tend to be people who don’t read science fiction. In fact, science fiction is sometimes written to prevent the future by holding a mirror to our society to show us truth. Once we get over being startled we realize that we’re looking at ourselves.

In 1957, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story called Strikebreaker. In the story a human society of around thirty thousand individuals lives inside of a small moon. Each job within the society is held by a few families, creating a rigid caste system. The system proves most oppressive to the one family who operates the society’s waste disposal system.

The system was totally automated. No individual had any physical contact with human wast…