Told in a series of short fragments, I devoured this tense and strange book in a single afternoon. What is work? What is life? What is a human? Prepare to be unsettled as you puzzle your way through these questions and try to figure out who or what is inhabiting the Six Thousand Ship. The sterile world of the ship is actually teeming with lifeforms and mysterious objects around each creepy corner.
— Jess
A series of mysterious objects onboard a ship elicit strong emotional and mental responses from the human and humanoid crew. The rest is unknown. Really unknown. I'm still not sure what happened and that's the raw beauty of Ravn's work! Exploring the relationships we have to work, to the objects around us, and much more, take a trip through this future space and see what you find...
— Kasey
Poetic and strange and overwhelming. This book asks the question: Should we be worried about what corporatism does to our perception of each other? The answer is yes, but also maybe not, but almost definitely yes. Written using exit interview statements. Come to it when drafting your resignation letter, stay for the beautiful story.
— Blake
February 2022 Indie Next List
“The Employees is haunting, poetic, sterile yet bursting with sensation. A series of reflections on what it means to be human, to spend life working, disconnected from the natural world and others. For those who ask ‘is this all there is?’”
— Henry Williams, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
Description
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare
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.
About the Author
Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021.
Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.
Praise For…
A deeply sensory book, suffused with aroma and alert to tactility... The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human… This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space.
— Justine Jordan - Guardian
An alarmingly brilliant work of art — Max Porter
Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalizing puzzle you can never quite solve. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human. — Mark Haddon
What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby. — Tank Magazine
An achingly beautiful mosaic of fragile characters managing their longing, pain, and alienation. This gorgeous, evocative novel is well worth the effort. — Publishers Weekly
In brief numbered statements delivered by the human and nonhuman crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a shadowy committee, Ravn seeds her narrative with direct and allegorical reflections on transhumanism, disappearing nature, and the ambiguities of being embodied... The novel is by turns queasily exact about what is seen—skin pitted like pomegranate, an object’s furrows oozing some nameless balm—and willfully obscure. Ambiguity is everything: “I don’t know if I’m human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?” — Brian Dillon - 4columns
The Employees asks important questions about what makes up human consciousness, and also, critiques corporate language that can make its way into our lives sometimes without us knowing. It's very funny. It's very interesting. I definitely recommend checking this one out.
— Corinne Segal - WNYC
A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space. — Kirkus
Few stories today are as sublimely strange and their own thing as Olga Ravn’s The Employees. This disorienting, mind-bending expanse recalls as much the poetry of Aase Berg as the workplace fiction of Thomas Ligotti. Something marvelously sui generis for the jaded.
— Jeff VanderMeer
The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship. What The Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all.
“The Employees is haunting, poetic, sterile yet bursting with sensation. A series of reflections on what it means to be human, to spend life working, disconnected from the natural world and others. For those who ask ‘is this all there is?’”