The Newcomers (Alien Nation): District 9's aliens are most often compared to the Tenctonese, better known as the Newcomers. Like the D9 aliens, the Newcomers just can't catch a break. After fleeing from slavery on their own planet, a quarter of a million Newcomers land in Los Angeles to find a sometimes less than welcoming human population. Aside from the unfortunate names some INS officials assign the new arrivals (in the original movie, Matt Sykes' partner was named "Sam Francisco"), there are anti-alien Purists who think the Tenctonese should have stayed on Tencton, and plenty of murder, both from humans looking to eradicated the Newcomers and from those who would harvest their life-extending glands.

The Citizens of the Dominion (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): With all of its explorations of race and morality, the Star Trek universe has had its fair share of oppressed species: the Troglyte miners who served their fellow Ardanans, the Romulans' Reman slaves, the Orion women (who only appear to be slaves), the Tosk who serve as prey for the Hunters' sport, the Bajorans who endure 50 years of Cardassian occupation, and, of course, anyone who encounters the Borg. But the Founders of the Dominion have a special talent for oppression, from engineering the supersoldier Jem'Hadar with an innate addiction to the drug ketracel white to infecting the Trevean with a congenital blight. Even the Vorta, who serve as the Dominion's middle managers, are mere slaves to the Founders, and are compelled to commit suicide if it serves their masters' purposes.

Clone Troopers (Star Wars): Slavery runs rampant in the Galactic Empire, with the Empire itself enslaving species like the Wookiees and the Mon Calamari wholesale, and some races, like the Twi'leks, would sell their own children into slavery in hopes of offering them a better life. And biological species buy and sell sentient droids (and ban them from their bars) without a second thought. But the genetically engineered (though otherwise human) Clone Troopers hold a special place among Star Wars' oppressed beings. Not only are they specifically grown for compulsory military service, they are essentially the property of the Galactic Republic, a government that has supposedly outlawed slavery.

The Ood (Doctor Who): Humans looking to have their own sentient slave without the guilt were told they could pick up an Ood servant with minimal damage to the conscience. After all, the Ood live to serve, right? Nothing in the Doctor's universe is ever so easy, and Donna and the Doctor soon discover that Ood Operations, the company supplying the alien servants, had cut off the Ood's telepathic link to the Ood brain, hampering their free will and leaving them to mix drinks and do laundry for their human masters.

Banik (Farscape): Oppression is a fairly widespread characteristic of the Farscape universe. Pretty much anyone living under Peacekeeper rule has a few humanoid rights trampled on (including the Peacekeepers themselves), and Scarrans have a pair of servant races who provide them with soldiers, intelligence agents, and technicians. But the Baniks hold an especially low place in the Farscape hierarchy. Having been mostly wiped out by Peacekeeper forces, the remaining Baniks have been enslaved, and the Banik Stark is repeatedly subjected to Scorpius' Aurora Chair, a torture and interrogation device. But the casual disregard for the lives of Baniks reaches its most shocking low when Scorpius purchases a lot of slaves that includes 9,999 Baniks and D'Argo's son Jothee. After he purchases the lot, Scorpius hands the slaves over to Natira, who, having no use for them, simply exterminates them all.

Sewer Mutants (Futurama): The 31st Century has little respect for humanoid or alien life, but at least most life forms are afforded the common courtesy of being able to walk the Earth's surface. Sewer mutants have no such privileges, requiring special permission to leave the subterranean ruins of New York. Sewer mutants, in turn, stick it to the sub-mutants, who are relegated to the sub-sewer (probably New York's original sewer system).

House Elves (Harry Potter): House Elves are powerful magical beings, with the ability to repel some of the most powerful wizards to come out of Hogwarts. But most of their magic goes toward serving their often less than noble wizard masters. House Elves are compelled to punish themselves if they disobey their masters or even utter an unkind word against them, and at least one ancient wizarding family held onto a gruesome tradition of decapitating elderly House Elves, then mounting their stuffed heads on the wall.

Dracs (Enemy Mine): Humans and Dracs are in the midst of a bitter war, so it's little surprise that the humans tolerate scavengers who capture Dracs for slave labor. But it also helps a brutal set of outlaws thrive without concern for human laws or Drac life.

Denizens of the Kzinti Empire (Known Space): The Kzinti began their lives in the galactic community as mercenaries, but once their Jotok clients taught them to use their weapons and technology, the Kzinti quickly turned on them, enslaving their former employers. From there, the Kzinti spread out across the galaxy, enslaving or eating any species they encountered. Although some subject worlds were more or less ignored by the Kzinti, some species were pushed off their worlds entirely, and breaking Kzinti law meant execution by hunting (usually followed by a feast featuring the accused as the main course). Even Kzin females, termed Kzinretti, are oppressed by their males, having been rendered subsapient by the hijacked Jotok technology.

Vortigaunt (Half-Life): Vortigaunts are the slaves of slaves, used by the Nihilanth as military forces or as factory workers. Although their enslavement forces the Vortigaunt to oppose Gordon Freeman in the first game, they get a bit of a happy ending when Freeman kills the Nihilanth. Once freed of their extradimensional masters, the Vortigaunts seek to keep humanity from falling to a similar fate, working against the Combine forces.

Neosapiens (Exosquad): Artificially created for life as laborers on Mars, the Neosapiens are stronger and faster than Terran humans, require little food and no sleep, and have a longer natural lifespan than their masters. You would think humans might think twice before creating such a physically advanced race only to enslave them, but they have to deal with the consequences in the ensuing rebellions. But the Neosapiens were not above creating servants of their own, engineering the animalistic Neo Warriors to serve as the Neosapiens' ground forces.

Mutants (X-Men): "Have you tried not being a mutant?" The classic line from X2 pretty much says it all. It's bad enough that the mutants have to cope with powers they don't always fully understand, or that their lives are punctuated by the occasional supervillain attack or alien invasion; they also have to cope with humans who hate and fear them, and religious fanatics who see them as an affront to God.

Cylons (Battlestar Galactica): Artificial beings have been oppressed by humans since Karel Čapek's R.U.R. premiered, and they've been turning on their masters just as long. The Cylons get bonus points, not because the nature of their oppression is unique, but because they're simultaneously portrayed as essentially human and yet dehumanized by their human enemies. Even forgetting racial slurs like "toaster" and "skin job" used to remind humans that their fleshier foes still have robot parts, there are some in the Colonial Fleet, like the rapist members of the Pegasus crew, who are inclined to treat the humanoid Cylons as warm-bodied objects. And the Cylons continue the cycle of oppression, with the humanoid Cylons effectively lobotomizing the Centurions and treating the Raiders as glorified pets.

Humans: Humans are the oppressed species nearly as often as they are the oppressors. Sometimes, we're enslaved by our own creations, as in the Matrix trilogy. Sometimes we've simply lost out as the dominant species of the planet, as in Planet of the Apes. Sometimes an alien invader simply decides we'll make good slaves, as in Stargate or Battlefield Earth. But we're a reliably plucky species, and even if we don't manage to pull ourselves out of the gutter, we don't make life easy for our oppressors.

Since the cyberpunk 1980s, when the most popular visions of the future included corporate-urban caste systems, the idea of financial disaster has haunted scifi. While Babylon AD may have been a flop as a film, it's merely the latest in a long line of scifi tales that show a resource-depleted future divided between a tiny, glowing group of rich people and a global, subaltern class that lives in shantytowns. Even Dark Knight veered toward this vision of a future overrun by criminality, where skyscrapers have become dank, impoverished husks, and the ranks of public servants have shriveled down to one good cop, one good DA, and a mercenary weirdo.

The Road, both the Cormac McCarthy novel and the movie coming out next month, depict a future of nomadic poverty whose origins remain unexplained. Clearly there's been an economic disaster, but we're not sure if it's been spurred by Max Headroom-style corporate greed or something like a nuclear war.

One thread that runs through stories about financial collapse is the idea that corporations run wild while government withers away. That was certainly the basis of cyberpunk classics Blade Runner and Neuromancer, and that tradition continues today in spirited satires like Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government. In that book, everyone takes the last name of their employer — our hero, a detective, is one of the tiny group of government workers who barely hold their own against the money-fueled shenanigans of the corporate classes (even Jennifer has to send her kid to a McDonalds school).

Other authors, like Octavia Butler, imagine that the collapse of government in America will be accompanied by a rise in gang power, as well as (more dangerously) the power of Christian militias. In her intense, believable novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Christians kidnap "unbelievers" and put them in horrifying work/reeducation camps. Written before The Road, these novels also include harrowing scenes of homeless nomads on the road, trying to survive attacks from cannibals, Christians, and worse.

Having destroyed civilization or divided humanity into rigid economic castes, science fiction can try to solve problem Terminator-style, but throwing its characters out of the timeline in the hopes that they'll remake the world or find a better one. Japanese comedy Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust has the most literal take on this plot device: A woman in contemporary Japan uses a washing/time machine to travel back to the economic boom days of the early 1990s in the hope that she can get a bunch of cash to help her out of present-day debts. The trouble with this kind of time-travel solution is that it may get our heroine out of debt, but it doesn't exactly save the world.

For world-saving solutions, you've got to go offworld and start terraforming. Butler's hero in the Parable novels works tirelessly to create generation ships that will take the downtrodden of Earth to another planet where they can reboot the economy. Ursula Le Guin's award-winning novel The Dispossessed takes place in a universe where a woman like Butler's heroine has succeeded and founded an anarchist-feminist colony on a moon in orbit around a planet of caste-divided capitalists. Unfortunately, the anarchist-feminists haven't solved all the problems of their parent society, and in fact the resource-hungry moon where they live has created a society of poor people whose government controls where they work and live.

The economic disaster of the planet Arakkis in Frank Herbert's Dune franchise is another target for terraforming. After hero Paul leads the oppressed Fremen in a successful revolution to wrest control of the planet's resources from a colonist ruling class, they slowly work to transform the planet from a desert to a rain-soaked, livable biosphere. Unfortunately, they recreate all the problems they suffered under despots like the Duke who rules Arakkis in the first Dune novel. Royal families battle to control the Fremen society, and rich family dynasties still control the destinies of the still-disenfranchised masses.

More successful are the colonists in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, where several of the early colonists are explicitly trying to build an economy that is more just than the ones back on Earth. Even if these imaginary societies ultimately fail, there is still a tremendous pleasure in destroying them repeatedly to watch them flounder towards productivity again. Robinson does this by destroying most of Mars in a spectacular space elevator crash. But you can see this same urge to smash and rebuild the economy in the popularity of videogames like Sim City and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a space colonization strategy game that was a spinoff of the wildly-popular Civilization I and II.

Perhaps the most popular solution to economic turmoil in science fiction is slavery. This is the subject of Brian Frances Slattery's recent novel Liberation, but is also the a cornerstone of pop fantasies like Blade Runner (slave replicants), I, Robot (slave robots), Planet of the Apes ("uplifted" ape slaves), and of course Battlestar Galactica and The Matrix (both have angry machine slaves). Each of these slave classes is created to make a broken economy run again. The idea is that humans, freed of drudge work, will become more productive and create inventions to bring about a better world.

Sometimes those inventions are themselves robot slaves. Scientists are also always trying to solve the economic crises of Earth by inventing amazing AIs that will allocate resources perfectly for us. This is precisely what happens at the end of Asimov's original I, Robot book, where a robot becomes world president and no humans ever want for resources again. Less-successful efforts to save the economy via AI can be found in David Gerrold's underrated When HARLIE Was One (read the original, not the rewrite) and the movie Demon Seed. In the former, HARLIE the mega-bot would rather hallucinate and write poetry than come up with strategies to build more efficient widgets. And in the latter, Proteus the AI would rather imprison and rape Julie Christie than explain how to fix Earth's financial crisis.

And so you might say slavery is in some ways the classic science fiction fix for economic crisis. It provides a quick solution that spins out an infinitely-reproducible number of crises, problems, and moral dilemmas. Like time travel, slavery does not fix the financial collapse for everybody — just for the few who remain free. Even worse, your slaves tend to revolt Dune-style, take over the planet, and fuck things up exactly the same way you did. So slavery shares with terraforming the basic problem that wherever the human species goes, there it is.

You'll never get a good story without conflict, so scifi may not make a good model for real-life financial fixes. And yet it does manage to reflect at least one truth about real-life economic systems: We cannot seem to dream up a way out of our economic failures that does not have its own failures built in from the start. We are, like the humans in Planet of the Apes, always replacing one kind of slavery with another.