A group of working class people run a dangerous path toward a promised Elysium, and those who survive are rewarded with nothing they can appreciate or comprehend.

In a society where the top one percent rules the lower classes, a teenage girl is forced out of her home by ethnic cleansing and must turn to a wealthy man in order to survive.

In a universe where the poor remain on earth and the rich live in space, a poverty-stricken Black teenager with a life-threatening illness dreams of visiting the upper world and is offered a chance to do so through a high school science contest.

From factory workers to the king, members of all social classes in an industrialized society are distraught with their way of life and desire socioeconomic change. In scheming to join the revolution they deem inevitable, everyone struggles to be the first to initiate the highly desired change.

A working class man who wants his children to have everything their rich friends have purchases "Semplica Girls" — girls formerly living in poverty who sign contracts to hang as ornaments in people's yards — for his older daughter's birthday. When his younger daughter frees the Semplica Girls, the family is plunged into financial disaster.

A woman returns home to her family having just slept with another man. At dinner, her son gets into an argument with his father about their privilege. As the narrative moves back to the time they spent abroad in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, fractures in the family life are revealed.

After a long struggle, a disabled woman in her twenties finally finds work at a pathology lab in Boston that rewards her rapid pace and ability to outproduce her coworkers—but when her elderly coworker falls behind, will she help her?

To earn enough money for college, a high school graduate takes a grueling factory job. He expects his only takeaway from the work to be a paycheck, but a mysterious coworker teaches him about the world and his place in it.

After a global nuclear war on Earth, white man rockets over to a community of Black expatriates living on Mars and begs them to take in the remaining survivors. A Black resident convinces his town they need to prevent racism by segregating any white newcomers, but his wife implores him to think of their common humanity.

Two jobless Harvard graduates who mostly read Marx and do acid reckon with the changing times since their days of revelry at university.