The Employees | A workplace novel of the 22nd century | by Olga Ravn
The Employees | A workplace novel of the 22nd century | by Olga Ravn
Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
A Time 100 must-read book of 2022
A The Guardian Book of the Year
A TLS Book of the Year
A Financial Times Best Summer Books
An LRB Bookshop Autumn Pick
Shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2022
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021
Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021
Longlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award 2022
The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.
Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly living.
Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, while delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by the logic of productivity.
Publication 1 October 2020
Description 185 × 125 mm, 133 pages, Softcover Original
ISBN 978-1-9999928-8-0
Design Ard — Chuard & Nørregaard
Read a sample here
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.
MARTIN AITKEN has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.
Praise for The Employees
The Employees is a clever exploration of what it means to be a person – and an excellent satire of corporate lingo
– Mahita Gajanan, Time 100 must-read books of 2022
[A]n unforgettable novel about the psychic costs of labor under capitalism… Dreamlike and sensual, The Employees shouldn’t be missed
– Esquire
The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship... What The Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all
– Laura Miller, New York Review of Books
Ravn asks us to envision a future in which the machines, rather than the humans that create and maintain them, lead the workers’ revolution
– Lauren Nelson, Los Angeles Review of Books
The Employees is a short book, but it contains multitudes. Ravn’s open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations is poetry
– John Crowley, The Boston Review
God died, and soon the Earth will too, but in this Danish dystopian novel told in vignettes from laborers floating on a spaceship in the 22nd century, work remains
– Jacob Rosenberg, Mother Jones
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
Few stories today are as sublimely strange and their own thing as Olga Ravn’s The Employees. This disorienting, mind-bending expanse recalls as much the poetry of Aase Berg as the workplace fiction of Thomas Ligotti. Something marvelously sui generis for the jaded
– Jeff Vandermeer
The voices of humans and humanoids are almost indistinguishable as they describe the disturbing dreams, imaginary smells, skin complaints and wild thoughts that seem to be provoked by these mysterious things, which hum, or ooze resin, or lay eggs… One humanoid co-worker refers to the parts of the Six-Thousand Ship where the humans are quartered as “a museum, a prison, a brothel … a nursery”. There may still be division in Ravn’s twenty-second century, but humans and humanoids alike answer to a distant, faceless corporation. If that’s a fate worth avoiding, there is still plenty of work for us all to do
– Richard Lea, TLS
What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby
– Tank Magazine
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
– Justine Jordan, The Guardian
The Employees is a strangely affecting work of speculative fiction which brings Vuillard’s war of the poor to the heavens. Irrespective of who wins the Booker International prize, they can be glad of the company they have kept on this ambitious and innovative shortlist
– Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
Stunning and poetic… All I want to do is quote the many highlighted bits that I keep returning to on a regular basis, lines of poetry that I keep repeating to myself
– Barbara Halla, Asymptote
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
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
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 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
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’
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
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