What is the structure of The Employees?

The novel is presented as a series of reports, interviews, and observations from both human and humanoid crew members, offering multiple perspectives on the events unfolding on the ship. This fragmented structure requires readers to piece together the narrative from various subjective accounts.

How does The Employees relate to Olga Ravn's other works?

The Employees shares Ravn's characteristic exploration of the human condition, often through unconventional narrative forms and a focus on the psychological impact of external pressures. It continues her interest in themes of labor, identity, and the body, which are also prominent in her poetry and earlier novels.

The Employees

A workplace novel of the 22nd century

Science Fiction Literary Fiction

Pages: 114
Published: 2022
Language: English

Synopsis

The Six-Thousand Ship is crossing space with a mixed crew of humans and humanoids, and the book reaches the reader as a set of staff reports and memos. Each employee describes the daily work, the irritations of shipboard life and the small humiliations of being measured by output.

The ship has taken on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery. Soon the crew grows deeply and oddly attached to them, and the attachment is hard for anyone to explain. As it spreads, tension builds toward mutiny, most sharply among the humanoids.

This is science fiction in a fragmentary, document-based form, closer to an office satire set in deep space than to an adventure. The tone is funny and doom-laden at once, with a chill running under the jokes. The book is short on conventional plot and works by accumulation, with one voice after another adding to the picture.

Its questions are about what makes a person human and what happens to people when life is run by the logic of productivity. The International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize both put it on their shortlists, and the 2022 National Book Award longlisted it.

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