The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

by Olga Ravn, Martin Aitken (Translator)

Overview

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

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the 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. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231350
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	775,009
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.90(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

10/25/2021

The crew of a spaceship far from Earth struggle with conflicting emotions in this slippery and deeply resonant International Booker shortlisted novel from Ravn (Celestine). The inhabitants of the Six Thousand Ship, some human and others humanoid robots, become oddly attached to a collection of perplexing alien objects found on the planet New Discovery. In a series of disconnected, one-sided internal reports to an unnamed authority, the mostly unnamed crew members relay their intense, confused reactions to the objects. Humans express a longing for Earth—one employee’s job is to “make sure the human section of the crew don’t buckle under to nostalgia and become catatonic”—sometimes alleviated by being near the objects, while humanoids begin showing emotions well beyond their programming. (One, worrying about being the best employee, would “like to request some material concerning which actions require forgiveness.”) When the humanoids’ behavior takes a troubling turn, the company intervenes in a shocking manner. While initially disorienting, the fragmented style builds into an achingly beautiful mosaic of fragile characters managing their longing, pain, and alienation. This gorgeous, evocative novel is well worth the effort. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Olga Ravn’s The Employees unpacks like a miraculous gift, alive with changes. Peeling off the first wrap, things look eerie, then at the next mundane, and while the crackle might sound like laughter, it also shivers with terror or poignancy. Short as the novel is, some chapters just a few lines, it’s intense, sumptuous, and utterly distinctive."

The Brooklyn Rail - John Domini

"In its imaginative world, the utopian dream of surveillance capitalism has finally come to fruition. Aboard the Six Thousand Ship, where Ravn’s protagonists live, activity and language are carefully shaped around work...Ravn creates a world that is complementary to our own and yet far more menacing."

The Nation - Jessica Loudis

"Transporting and ephemeral—an unforgettable novel about the psychic costs of labor under capitalism. Dreamlike and sensual, The Employees shouldn't be missed."

Esquire

"This is more than a clever reframing of sci-fi tropes, although it’s that, too; the employees’ voices themselves, some of them desperate, some of them meditative, form a touching, alienated chorus, narrating a tragedy that for many will ring eerily true."

Vulture

"What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby."

Tank Magazine

"This is more than a clever reframing of sci-fi tropes, although it’s that, too; the employees’ voices themselves, some of them desperate, some of them meditative, form a touching, alienated chorus, narrating a tragedy that for many will ring eerily true."

The AV Club - Laura Adamczyk

"The Employees is framed as a collection of increasingly bizarre memos filed by the crew of a deep-space vessel, who seem to be infatuated with the strange cargo they picked up from an alien world. As their obsession turns to mania, things start to go wrong in hilarious, grim, spectacular ways. Only 144 pages long and full of white space, The Employees achieves its macabre, chaotic mission at light speed."

Philadelphia Inquirer - Patrick Rapa

"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."

WNYC - Corinne Segal

"The Employees feels close to Greek mythology. Like the figures of an epic, the workers seem composed of equal parts fate and randomness, automation and rebellion. The actual business of the Six Thousand Ship is nevertheless wholly modern: resource extraction, as employees make occasional excursions to harvest commodities known only as 'objects.' These soon come to derail—delightfully—both the ship’s functioning and its crew’s philosophizing."

Bookforum - Zoe Hu

"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 New York Review of Books - Laura Miller

"The Employees is a clever exploration of what it means to be a person—and an excellent satire of corporate lingo. "

Time Magazine - Mahita Gajanan

"God died, and soon the Earth will too, but in this Danish dystopian novel told in vignettes from laborers floating on a spaceship in the 22nd century, work remains."

Mother Jones - Jacob Rosenberg

"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?”"

4columns - Brian Dillon

"Charged with a melancholy lyricism that gives this series of cosmic memos the feel and radiance of prose poetry."

Lit Hub - John Fulton

"[The] manipulation of contrasting tones—from management speak to emotional candor—is as much the handiwork of Ravn as it is Martin Aitken, who translated The Employees from Danish. The term “masterful” is so oft-used as to become diluted, bordering on cliché, but in the case of Aitken, it applies in its truest sense. Aitken, who has also translated works by Karl Ove Knausgård and the PEN Translation Prize-winning Love by Hanne Ørstavik, captures the distinct voices of the countless characters whose recorded statements make up The Employees, and pulls off perhaps the hardest feat of translation—the feeling that the work hasn’t been translated at all."

Tor - Sophia Stewart

"In surreal, tactile, and often funny prose, Olga Ravn’s The Employees and Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory present the workplace as a hallucinogenic hall of mirrors, a crucible where our sense of self warps and dissolves."

The Atlantic - Stephen Kearse

"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

"Ravn asks us to envision a future in which the machines, rather than the humans that create and maintain them, lead the workers’ revolution."

LARB

"The Employees is a short book, but it contains multitudes. Ravn’s open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations is poetry."

Boston Review - John Crowley

"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."

Guardian - Justine Jordan

★ 2021-11-17
A workplace drama set in the 22nd century on a spaceship orbiting a distant planet.

Aboard the interstellar spacecraft the Six Thousand Ship, Earth-born humans and their bioengineered humanoid counterparts work together according to well-established company protocols. Their mission is to curate and tend the mysterious, alluring, and perhaps even sentient objects brought up from the surface of New Discovery, the Earth-like planet whose exploration is the Six Thousand Ship’s mission. The ship itself is tightly run, with employees in place for every conceivable need—be it laundry, reeducation, or cremation—and the labor does not seem to be difficult. It soon becomes apparent, however, that something is disrupting the workflow on the Six Thousand Ship. The objects are impacting their human and humanoid caretakers in different ways; eliciting erotic responses in some, paranoia in others, an uneasy sense of maternal responsibility or a near catatonic state of existential quandary in still others of the crew. In concordance with, or perhaps as the result of, the growing sense that the objects exist “in communion” with the employees, a rift between the human, and therefore mortal, and the humanoid, and therefore capable of being endlessly “reuploaded,” workers is having deleterious—even dangerous—effects on workplace productivity. To address this problem, a committee of impartial mediators has spent the last 18 months interviewing crew members and compiling the resulting recordings into the document of this book. The result is both familiar in its petty irritations and clandestine attractions (“In the line in the canteen I suddenly realize I feel a kind of tenderness for Cadet 14”) and unsparingly strange confessions (“I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught up under my nails like fish eggs....I feel this has something to do with the objects in the rooms”) that bode ill for the increasingly fractious crew. In place of a dedication, Ravn gives thanks to installation artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund for the material inspiration for the book, yet, even without knowing what Hestelund’s work looks like, the world Ravn has created is familiar enough in its tropes and human(oid) emotions to infect the reader’s imagination.

A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space.

Kirkus Reviews

"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

"An alarmingly brilliant work of art"

Max Porter