The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century
Now in paperback, The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
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Community Reviews
A strange, mildly surrealist story superficially set in a distant future. There is ample skill in the way details unfold and the messy-yet-mostly-understandable prose (the story is told through a series of "interviews"). However, I don't know that I actually enjoyed it. It didn't feel like it knew what it wanted to be. Is it weird fiction, playing with ideas on the edge of comprehension? Is it SciFi? Is it an exploration of humanity and what we could consider "human"? Is it a scathing critique of work culture? Yes. All of these. But none of them felt deeply explored or well integrated.
Written as a series of testimonies from crew of a spaceship, it threw up a lot of questions about what makes a "person".
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