The near-distant future, millions of miles from Earth. 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 board a number of strange organic objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew find themselves becoming deeply attached to them. Through a series of short, non-chronological and anonymous personal statements, the human and humanoid employees reveal that they are longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy; loved ones who have passed; the far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. 

The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. 

Humans

The humans on the ship originally come from Earth, though it’s never revealed how they came to be chosen to be a part of the crew. None of them are named. They start to become nostalgic about their previous lives on Earth and yearn for simple pleasures. Humans are recognised as being those who were born naturally and who will eventually die.

Humanoids

The humanoids are artificial humans who are also part of the crew on the ship. They were created from pods and possess human-like bodies. Programmed to perform certain tasks, they were created to carry out duties on the ship. They are constantly updated to include new knowledge and features and are aware that they cannot die, but instead, will just be restarted in another place. It is often unclear which personal statements in the book are attributed to humans and which are attributed to humanoids.

Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. She is also a literary critic and has written for Politiken and several other Danish publications. Alongside Johanne Lykke Holm, she runs the feminist performance group and writing school Hekseskolen.

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 US National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.

Lauren Nelson, The Los Angeles Review of Books

‘At first, the statements are chiefly concerned with describing the new objects. Ravn’s imagery in these passages is both beautiful and intensely enigmatic. In many ways, these images drive the plot — the episodic nature of the novel means that much of the plot is relayed retrospectively, and often in abstract or opaque language. While this might feel disorienting at first, Ravn grounds us in rich descriptions of the strange objects and their effects on the workers.’

Jessica Loudis, The Nation

‘Ravn is up to something different in The Employees, exchanging dystopian clichés for something closer to the emotional striving of a coming-of-age narrative: Imagine I, Robot meets Flowers for Algernon with a dash of the office novel. By doing so, Ravn aligns her compact novel with works like Spike Jonze’s Her, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, in which robots are on the other end of the sympathy spectrum, no longer merely reflections of the dangers of human hubris but characters in their own right.’

Justine Jordan, The Guardian

‘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.’

Laura Miller, The New York Review of Books

‘Gnomic and elliptical where most science fiction is expository … The language they use to describe their dreams and memories is compressed and vivid, the language of a poet in Martin Aitken’s crystalline English translation. When their statements escalate into strings of clauses, the result is not numbing but incantatory, an ecstasy of remembrance, mourning, and hope.’

Brian Dillon, 4Columns

‘Ravn’s book has a sickly, anxious energy all its own. Though the crew’s testimony is plainly stated, it’s also quite opaque: we sometimes know who is speaking (the first officer, say, or the ship’s funeral director) and at times can be sure that person is human […] Ravn carefully rations plot details: the stirrings of incipient revolt, a nostalgia for Earth that has overtaken the humans, the disappearing authority of Lund and maybe also of the committee’s inquisitors. The testimonial format has to do most of the labor of characterization, plot, and suggestive imagery—it’s a feat to achieve this in short fragments without too much overt thematic semaphore.’

‘I worked closely together with the artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund, while writing the book, and she suggested a space somewhere between a spaceship and an Alexander Wang flagship store, which was very inspiring to me. I wanted a space that was completely confined, with no exit, and I also wanted to see what would happen if human beings were taken out of their ecology, away from Earth. By making Earth distant I could examine man’s relationship to it in a new way. I wanted to examine how we relate to the soil, the weather, the atmosphere, and I wanted to write about this obsession with resources. And when I say resources, I mean both land and bodies. I also needed personally to write about a feeling of having lost your relationship to land. So, I made the characters lose contact with Earth, literally.’

Read the full interview here.

‘With The Employees I wanted to awaken something – something that has always been there. We all have this deep connection with our ecology, with our planet, with each other. We’re all deeply sensual, loving beings. We are also destructive and greedy, but I have a strong belief in and hope and love for humans.’

Read the full interview on Tank Magazine.

Instead of traditional chapters or a linear plot, The Employees is structured as a series of anonymous, non-chronological personal statements from the ship’s crew, which have been compiled by a committee investigating the effects of the mysterious objects on board. Did you find the structure of the novel easy to follow, challenging or confusing? How did the book’s unusual format affect your overall reading experience? Have you read other books with a similarly unusual structure?

The Employees blends elements of speculative fiction, science fiction, and existential literature. In what ways do you think the novel challenges traditional expectations of sci-fi or speculative fiction?

The narrative is deliberately ambiguous and provides limited information about the Six-Thousand Ship and its crew, including the objects they have discovered. Much of the novel requires readers to come up with their own meanings and interpretations. Do you feel that Ravn has provided enough information for you to be able to draw firm conclusions? 

The crew members – both human and humanoid – become deeply attached to the objects they have discovered, describing a sense of euphoria when interacting with them. Why do you think this is, and what specifically might the objects represent for the humans and humanoids?

The human crew members begin to yearn for simple earthly pleasures, such as love, shopping, road trips and cookies, which Ravn describes as ‘nostalgia attacks’. Interestingly, the humanoid crew members begin to want similar things, despite never having experienced them. Why do you think Ravn gives the humanoid crew members many of the same desires as the humans?

Throughout the book, Ravn uses visceral and sensual descriptions, such as pulsing lips, in response to an object described as an egg, or a crew member dreaming of pores growing larger, with seeds inside. What do you think is the purpose behind these vivid, unsettling images, especially when set against the cold, sterile backdrop of the ship itself? Why might Ravn have chosen to include such powerful sensory details?

The Employees was written after Ravn was approached by artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund in 2018 to write notes for her art exhibition’s programme. The objects in the book are inspired by Hestelund’s organic, abstract scupltures (you can view images from the exhibition here). Considering the way the objects inspire a powerful emotional response among the crew members, to what extent is this a book about the power of art or beauty to change the way we experience the world?

Science fiction is full of descriptions of the conflicts and challenges that arise when humans and sentient humanoids are forced to interact. More often than not, articifical intelligence is presented as something dangerous for humanity. Would you say that is the case in The Employees?

Writing in the LA Review of Books, Lauren Nelson said of The Employees: ‘By taking a closer look at the fundamental relationship between artificial intelligence and the corporatization of our world, we might understand that the true threat comes in the form of CEOs and boards of directors, rather than technologically advanced machinery.’ To what extent would you agree that this is one of the book’s core messages?

The book’s subtitle makes it clear that this is a ‘workplace novel’. At one point in the novel the humanoid crew members rise up in a mutiny of sorts, in protest against the idea that they were created solely for work. At the same time, the human workers seem more passive and naive about their status as workers and the expectations placed upon them. If we are to understand that the book is telling us that there’s more to life than work, why do you think Ravn left it up to the humanoid crew to reach this conclusion, rather than the humans?

Lolli Editions: Reading with the Mouth: A Conversation with Olga Ravn

Lea Guldditte Hestelund: Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present

The Guardian: The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn review – ‘Am I human?’

Los Angeles Review of Books: The Inhumanity of Work: On Olga Ravn’s “The Employees”

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