The success of this satire is how relatable the story is. Yellowface describes a culture where the already-successful always have unfair advantage over the lesser confident and lesser known. I’m sure you, dear reader, have not taken credit for a colleague’s creativity, but I imagine you might know someone who has.

Oscar Wilde’s assumption that life imitates art might need a rethink. Right now, it looks like the other way around.

Away from the office, contemporary fiction also serves up compelling drama about a very different work experience. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, it’s Walmart and the cold realities of shelf-stacking in supermarkets - monotonous, low-paid work - which feature in the lives of characters in a coal mining community, which has fallen victim to economic hard times and America’s opioid crisis.

It isn’t just literary fiction which tells this story of unfair work, or not enough work, or shift work. Billy Joel performed Allentown, a song about the decline of the manufacturing sector during the last century and the feeling that working life was a series of broken promises at his sellout gigs at Madison Square Garden and London’s Hyde Park forty years after he first wrote the song.

In this respect, art does imitate life. Work’s themes are either eternal or cyclical.

Hard times and hustle culture crop up a lot in a slew of non-fiction books explaining work culture and history. In On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity, Derek Thompson writes that “today the norm is to think about employment and unemployment as a black-and-white binary, rather than two points at opposite ends of a wide spectrum of working arrangements.”

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This point is echoed in The Workplace You Need Now: Shaping Spaces for the Future of Work by Sanjay Rishi, Benjamin Breslau and Peter Miscovich, executives with the real estate property company JLL. The book predicts a future where work becomes “liquid,” noting that “employers and managers now need to view their workforces in terms of both employees and non-employees, which presents a challenge to creating a cohesive and integrated workplace ecosystem.”

The last word goes to a recent futuristic Danish novel, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, a sci-fi book set on a spaceship “some time in the future,” in which “someone touched me on the shoulder and I saw that it was a humanoid co-worker.”

Perhaps Oscar Wilde was prescient for our times. Pretty soon life will imitate art and the distinction between the humans and humanoids will echo some of sci-fi’s outer realms. At least we were entertained by art along the way.

Julia Hobsbawm is a Bloomberg columnist, podcaster and author of books including “The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work & the Workplace of the Future”.

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