The Employees by Olga Ravn
The Employees is a humorous and gloomy account of what happened to the Six-Thousand Ship. In a series of staff reports and memos, the human and humanoid crew members bemoan their everyday responsibilities. Even as tensions rise near mutiny, especially among the humanoids, the crew grows curiously and intensely devoted to the bizarre things the ship acquires from the planet New Discovery.
The writing of Olga Ravn is shiver-inducing, jolting, thrilling, and ominous. While offering a wonderfully biting critique of a way of life driven by the logic of production, The Employees explores what makes us human. It was on the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist.
The Employees by Olga Ravn
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This short story is recounted through comments made to an interviewer by crew members of a starship. Although it is a bizarre book, I truly like it. Both human and humanoid staff work on the ship, and both have viewpoints in the narrative. The conclusion and some following revelations about what was taking place aboard the ship astounded me.
The science fiction setting of this work makes it a natural candidate for that category. Recorded statements that were obtained as part of an inquiry into a disturbance on board the ship tell the tale. The stories have a surreal feel to them. Unidentified “things” on the ship appear to be inanimate yet have a big effect on the emotions of humans and humanoids. The novel is creatively written and exquisite.
This is an interesting book to read; it’s captivating, mesmerizing, disjointed, philosophical, and overall a superb piece of writing. Although the cadence, the imagery, and the pure beauty of some of the tiny, unexpected phrases here suggested to someone with a poetic bent, I was unaware that the author was a poet. This art has a peculiar, eccentric, and genuinely extraterrestrial quality.
