Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2022
144 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
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.
"[T]he 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 (starred review)
"The crew of a spaceship far from Earth struggle with conflicting emotions in this slippery and deeply resonant International Booker shortlisted novel from Ravn... 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." - Publishers Weekly
"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." - The Guardian (UK)
"Everything I'm looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art." - Max Porter
"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
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her debut poetry collection I Devour Myself Like Heather appeared to critical acclaim in 2012. Alongside Johanne Lykke Holm she ran the feminist performance group and writing school Hekseskolen from 2015 to 2019. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen's texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen readership worldwide.
Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Hoeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine.
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