The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

by Olga Ravn, Aitken, Martin

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

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.

 

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Release date: February 1, 2022

Publisher: New Directions

Print pages: 139

Sample

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 fibers. They keep her up with a strap made out of calf-colored leather with prominent white stitching. What color 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 up removing it. I haven’t told anyone before now. Maybe that was a mistake. The next day there was a hum. Louder than that, like an electric rumble. And the day after that she was quiet. She hasn’t made a sound since then. Is there some kind of sadness there? I always use both hands. I couldn’t say if the others have heard anything or not. Mostly I go there when everyone’s asleep. It’s no problem keeping the place clean. I’ve made it into my own little world. I talk to her while she rests. It might not look like much. There’s only two rooms. You’d probably say it was a small world, but not if you have to clean it.

STATEMENT 012

I don’t like to go in there. The three on the floor seem especially hostile, or maybe it’s indifference. As if by being so deeply indifferent they want to hurt me. I can’t understand why I feel I’ve got to touch them. Two of them are always cold, one is warm. You never know which is going to be the warm one. It’s as if somehow they recharge each other, or take turns to exchange their energy. Sometimes I’m not sure if they’re all one or three separate ones. Three individual units attuned to each other. I’ve seen intimacy between them. It frightens me, I hate it. I’ve known many more like them. It’s as if at any time, one of them can always be the others. As if they don’t actually exist on their own, but only in the idea of each other. They can multiply whenever they like, in bunches and clusters. On the hillsides they can resemble a kind of eczema. But as I said, I don’t like to go in there. They make me touch them, even if I don’t want to. They’ve got a language that breaks me down when I go in. The language is that they’re many, that they’re not one, that one of them is the reiteration of all of them.

STATEMENT 006

When did the dreams begin? It must have been after the first couple of weeks. In the dream, all the pores of my skin are wide open, and I see that in each one of them there’s a tiny stone. I feel I can’t recognize myself. I scratch and scratch at my skin until it bleeds. ...