The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

By Olga Ravn and Martin Aitken

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.
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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lolli Editions
• Release date: Sep 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781919609201

Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn (b. 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She has also edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books and was involved in the recent revival of Ditlevsen’s work in English.

Book preview

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Praise for The Employees

This beautiful and moving novel, set in a workplace – a spaceship some time in the future – is by turns loving and cold, funny and deliberately prosaic; capable of building a sense of existential horror one minute then quotidian comfort and private grief the next. In deceptively simple prose, threaded on a fully achieved and ambitiously experimental structure, it asks big questions about sentience and the nature of humanity. And about what happiness might be.

– 2021 International Booker Prize judges

"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, The Guardian

Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalising 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

"The Employees brings to mind what might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby."

– Barbara Epler

"Olga Ravn’s critique of life governed by work and the logic of productivity is long overdue. Through poetic insight and emotional eloquence, brilliantly delivered in Martin Aitken’s translation from Danish, she has created a frightening, astonishing literary experience.

– Steph Glover, It’s Freezing in LA!

"A pocket-sized space odyssey of uncanny proportion. Olga Ravn creates language as poetic data, seducing us with her soft-natured riot upon our sense of sentience. Aboard a doomed ship, a cycle of monologues from both humans and humanoids (at times indistinguishable) compose with spooky innocence a meditation on the vulnerability of intelligence. A sort of delicate Westworld – compact, crystalline, unnerving."

– Yelena Moskovich, author of Virtuoso

"The Employees considers the work that underlies others’ ability to dream, and the ways in which working with numinous objects may inspire a vision of a self-ownership and self-value in that labour, and beyond it… A reminder of the all-too-often inorganic imaginaries of space fiction."

– So Mayer

"If you love plot-heavy, character-driven SFF, look away now. The Employees is set on a spaceship staffed by humans and humanoids looking after some objects found on the planet New Discovery. Are the objects sentient? Are the humanoids becoming more human through contact with them? Is working the same as living? What is the light in the corridor? Revealing its secrets through brief, poetic reports made by the employees to unknown assessors, Olga Ravn’s elliptical and evocative novel builds deep effects – threat, desire, grief – from restrained means. It gets under your skin."

– Burley Fisher Staff Pick

"The Employees is a darkish vision – and, of course, not merely one of a possible future but rather of the contemporary workplace… An intriguing take on identity, function, and ‘humanity’."

– The Complete Review

"Samuel Beckett had he written the script for Alien."

– Nicolas Gary, ActuaLitté

Ravn’s prose is purposeful and sparse; the reader is merely drip-fed haunting details, such as the child-holograms given to human crew members who have been separated from their own children… Olga Ravn is an author to watch.

– The Indie Insider

A radically different intergalactic journey for extreme adventurers.

– Just A Word

In this science fiction novel, nourished by poetry and symbolism, Olga Ravn shows how life only has meaning through death. An illuminating message at a time when the apostles of transhumanism are trying to circumvent what they see, wrongly, as an end and not a beginning.

– Alice Develey, Le Figaro

A powerful and philosophical sci-fi experiment from a near-distant future, exploring what it means to be human and alive.

– Børsen img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png

As beautiful as it gets: Beauty and longing in the infinite universe.

– Berlingske img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png

An unsettling, endlessly dizzying work.

– Politiken img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png

A disquieting, delectable reading experience and one of the best answers for a contemporary novel I have read in a long time: ‘Is this problem human? If so, I would like to keep it.’

– Kristeligt Dagblad img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png

Olga Ravn has long since manifested herself as one of the most important and influential writers in Danish contemporary literature. Her new book is a spirited blend of cyborgs, living stones and productivity optimisations. A most thought-provoking, literary sci-fi novel.

– Jyllands-Posten img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png img2.png

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With thanks to Lea Guldditte Hestelund for her installations and sculptures, without which this book would not exist.

The following statements were collected over a period of 18 months, during which time the committee interviewed the employees with a view to gaining insight into how they related to the objects and the rooms in which they were placed. It was our wish by means of these unprejudiced recordings to gain knowledge of local workflows and to investigate possible impacts of the objects, as well as the ways those impacts, or perhaps relationships, might give rise to permanent deviations in the individual employee, and moreover to assess to what degree they might be said to precipitate reduction or enhancement of performance, task-related understanding and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, thereby illuminating their specific consequences for production.

STATEMENT 004

It’s not hard to clean them. The big one, I think, sends out a kind of a hum, or is it just something I imagine? Maybe that’s not what you mean? I’m not sure, but isn’t it female? The cords are long, spun from blue and silver fibres. They keep her up with a strap made out of calf-coloured leather with prominent white stitching. What colour is a calf, actually? I’ve never seen one. From her abdomen runs this long, pink, cord-like thing. What do you call it? Like the fibrous shoot of a plant. It takes longer to clean than the others. I normally use a little brush. One day she’d laid an egg. If I’m allowed to say something here, I don’t think you should have her hung up all the time. The egg had cracked when it dropped. The egg mass was on the floor underneath her and the thready end of the shoot was stuck in the egg mass. I ended

Reviews for The Employees

[Paddy Gunn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An imaginative, dark take on science-fiction. Unsettling at times; funny and tender at others. A quick-fire read that takes you on a few different journeys.

[mbmackay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This one is different! Just about zero characterisation, almost no plot, only 130 pages, but short-listed for the Booker International.Well, I enjoyed the creativity of a book that breaks just about all the rules of novel writing, but I didn't feel like gushing as much as the reviews in the blurb. I have found myself reflecting on the book after I finished - much more than usual. But this may just be due to the apparent incompleteness of the book, or it may be the writer's intention.So, good book, gIad I read it, but . . .

[yarb_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Weirdo novella about a starship whose human/android crew are losing their marbles after discovering alien artifacts on a distant world. It takes the form of statements from crewmembers of both kinds (it's often hard to tell them apart) to some unspecified earthbound assessor trying to figure out what's gone wrong. So it reads like an oral history.The setup reminded me of the film Aniara (2018), partly cause of its Scandiness I guess but also the mounting sense of longing (for earth, in the case of the humans, and for recognition/personhood/love in the case of the androids (which are called humanoids rather than androids)) and universal mental unraveling.The prose is in that obtuse semi-surreal register used by people like Ben Marcus and David Ohle, or maybe Kathryn Davis. The book was conceived as a short text to accompany an art installation and it kind of shows. The subtitle ("a workplace novel of the 22nd century") does some heavy lifting here, but to good effect. I think it is quite a poignant commentary on modern peonage, as well as a sad story about being lost, in space.

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First up, I feel the need to admit that I approached this novella with something of a chip on my shoulder, as I was suspicious that such a short work could live up to the hype. I know, one doesn't buy art by the measure, but I was skeptical that this was just another case of a literary writer trying their hand at science fiction, and impressing literary critics, but not living up to the standards of contemporary speculative fiction.Having said all that, I am actually quite impressed with this novella, which is more of a fable than an actual story; anyone looking for character development is probably not going to be happy with this work. What Ravn does really well though is to write about alienation and anxiety, between the Humans who are not coping well with their interstellar exile, the Humanoids who resent their second-class status, and the so-called "Objects" that, having been brought on the "Six Thousand Ship," seem to have an agenda of their own. This all being over-topped by a corporate command authority which is only concerned with individual well-being to the extent that it doesn't undermine "efficiency."While Ravn has gone out of her way to claim Ursula K. Le Guin as an influence ("The Word for World is Forest" comes to mind), there are a number of authors this book can be seen in conversation with; Stanislaw Lem and Jeff VanderMeer being high on the list. VanderMeer might be particularly relevant, in as much as this work can be seen as tip-toeing up to the edge of cosmic horror. Because "The Employees" can be seen to be in conversation with a considerable number of traditions in speculative fiction, I might also argue that the more such fiction you've read, the more you're probably going to get out of the work. Speaking as a long-time reader of SF and fantasy, it would have been perfectly appropriate for "The Employees" to have been short-listed for the appropriate year of eligibility for the Nebula or Hugo award.

[clrichm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have no idea what the hell I just read. It was very SCP-like in format, and I could probably draw lots of parallels between the SCP universe(s) and the book. I am so very, very confused about what I was meant to take away from the book, if anything, though. If it was just meant to be a brain screw, then it succeeded; if the author was trying to make some sort of statement about what it means to be human, etc., then I would definitely need to read it about four or five more times to try to figure out exactly what the statement was. (I won't discount the possibility that some sense was lost in translation.)Still uncertain about what happened to Earth in the first place. Is that where Homebase is? Or is it gone (the statement near the end referencing the storms might have indicated that)? The nature of the work meant that a lot of backstory was only ever going to be presented through subtext and inference, but I wish I could have inferred just a little bit more.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This experimental sci fi novel does not consist of a narrative. Rather, it is excerpts of interviews with both human and humanoid residents/employees of the Six-Thousand Ship in the 22nd century. As the book goes along, the reader slowly learns about the humans and humanoids, about the objects they have collected at New Discovery, about the ship, and about what has occurred. I really liked this book, and there is an off chance that I will bump it up to 5 stars in the future. But right now, there us too much I still wonder about. Was Earth destroyed? (I don't think so.) Was there a climate catastrophe? (Maybe--but there are humans on the ship that have memories readers will relate to.) Or is it just a ship for exploration/research? (Also maybe.) How did people get hired/chosen to work/live on the ship? To me, the meaning of what happened/is happening on the Six-Thousand Ship can't be fully appreciated without understanding how and why the ship and staff are even there.This is one of those books that made me want MORE.