Paperback, 125 pages
Published Sept. 20, 2020 by Lolli Editions.
Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike 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 become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things—warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory—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.
The text is partial, sprinkled with evocative phrases and images—while mostly antiseptic and corporate, like a meeting with HR; poetic.
Das Buch fängt langsam an und hat mich anfangs nicht wirklich begeistert. Erzählt wird die Geschichte eines Sechstausender-Schiffs, eines Raumschiffs unterwegs auf einer Pioniermission zu einem Planeten in einem anderen Sonnensystem.
Um diese Reise und auch folgende überhaupt hinzubekommen, besteht die Besatzung aus Menschen und Humanoiden, Bots, die teils organisch, teils mechanisch sind. Um sie alle zu managen und daraus zu lernen, gibt es eine Arbeitskommission, die Gespräche mit allen führt und den Zustand dieser autarken Gesellschaft überwacht. Protokolle dieser Gespräche zwischen Menschen oder Humanoiden und der Arbeitskommission lesen wir, unordentlich sortiert und nur in Teilen vorgelegt.
Wie wir erfahren, läuft das anfangs alles gut. Man kommt an, besucht den Planeten, bringt einige Gegenstände oder Artefakte mit, stellt diese aus. Alle Beteiligten, egal ob Mensch oder halbe Maschine, fangen an zu träumen und werden ihrer Arbeit und ihrer Mission überdrüssig.
Es gibt eine Revolte. Man greift zu extremen Mitteln. Trotz …
Das Buch fängt langsam an und hat mich anfangs nicht wirklich begeistert. Erzählt wird die Geschichte eines Sechstausender-Schiffs, eines Raumschiffs unterwegs auf einer Pioniermission zu einem Planeten in einem anderen Sonnensystem.
Um diese Reise und auch folgende überhaupt hinzubekommen, besteht die Besatzung aus Menschen und Humanoiden, Bots, die teils organisch, teils mechanisch sind. Um sie alle zu managen und daraus zu lernen, gibt es eine Arbeitskommission, die Gespräche mit allen führt und den Zustand dieser autarken Gesellschaft überwacht. Protokolle dieser Gespräche zwischen Menschen oder Humanoiden und der Arbeitskommission lesen wir, unordentlich sortiert und nur in Teilen vorgelegt.
Wie wir erfahren, läuft das anfangs alles gut. Man kommt an, besucht den Planeten, bringt einige Gegenstände oder Artefakte mit, stellt diese aus. Alle Beteiligten, egal ob Mensch oder halbe Maschine, fangen an zu träumen und werden ihrer Arbeit und ihrer Mission überdrüssig.
Es gibt eine Revolte. Man greift zu extremen Mitteln. Trotz allem gibt es weiterhin Liebe zwischen Menschen, zwischen Menschen und Maschinen und zwischen Menschen und Maschinen und ihren echten oder eingepflanzten oder halluzinierten Geistern aus ihrer Vergangenheit.
Und auf einmal ist das Buch packend, spannend, philosophisch, unterhaltsam, erkenntnisreich. Es regt zum Nachdenken an. Es zeigt einen Weg, aus einer Collage von Einzelblickpunkten das Gefühl einer Gruppe wieder zu geben, was eine Art zu schreiben ist, die mir selber schon glückte. Ist dies vielleicht das SciFi-Buch, das mir selber meinen Weg als Autor zeigt?
I read Olga Ravn's The Employees ("A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century"), and this book sure has some attributes.
The format of this book is ~entirely in disjointed and anonymous (confessional?/professional)? statements to an off-page undescribed committee.
Statement 015 I'm very happy with my add-on. I think you should let more of us have one. It's me and yet it's not me. I've had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part, which you say is also me.
Statement 011 The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn toward them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber.
I've included two partial statements here for flavor from adjacent pages, because this is the only way I feel like I can convey the Annihilation-esque vibes …
I read Olga Ravn's The Employees ("A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century"), and this book sure has some attributes.
The format of this book is ~entirely in disjointed and anonymous (confessional?/professional)? statements to an off-page undescribed committee.
Statement 015 I'm very happy with my add-on. I think you should let more of us have one. It's me and yet it's not me. I've had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part, which you say is also me.
Statement 011 The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn toward them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber.
I've included two partial statements here for flavor from adjacent pages, because this is the only way I feel like I can convey the Annihilation-esque vibes of this book.
The book opens with a preface that these statements are to help improve future workflows and prevent future deviation(!). There's a lot of creepy workplace language of productivity and add-ons and forced updates, but the book itself dwells more on employees struggling with uncertainty about what it means to be a human or a constructed humanoid.
I am still not sure what I think about this, but I am glad to have read it.
STATEMENT 084
"...I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught under my nails like fish eggs. Then, with a popping sound, new ones appear where I scratched the other ones away. I feel that this has something to do with the objects in the rooms, but I don't know how. There's something about their smoothness in relation to my skin...I got the impression that one of the objects wanted to take my skin away from me..."
The Employees is a short novel comprised of numbered interviews with "Employees" of the Six-Thousand ship, an exploration vessel whose full purpose is mostly unknown, but one of its functions is to house some strange objects that are recovered from an unknown place. Through the interviews with the employees, we get a vague idea of these mysterious objects which may or …
STATEMENT 084
"...I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught under my nails like fish eggs. Then, with a popping sound, new ones appear where I scratched the other ones away. I feel that this has something to do with the objects in the rooms, but I don't know how. There's something about their smoothness in relation to my skin...I got the impression that one of the objects wanted to take my skin away from me..."
The Employees is a short novel comprised of numbered interviews with "Employees" of the Six-Thousand ship, an exploration vessel whose full purpose is mostly unknown, but one of its functions is to house some strange objects that are recovered from an unknown place. Through the interviews with the employees, we get a vague idea of these mysterious objects which may or not be alive. However we quickly learn about some of the tensions among the crew as some of them are humans (from earth) and some are "humanoid" or constructed humans, designed to not age and whose consciousness can be uploaded and downloaded. There seems to be a schism rising between these two groups of employees that comes to a dangerous head.
What a fascinating little implication of a story. I loved the interview format that seemed to swing between sometimes quirky, sometimes horrific little anecdotes, and insight into the status of the mission and life on the Six-Thousand ship. It hints at much larger goings on, but the author keeps the reader just out of reach of the full context. Some of the interviews can feel a bit silly or out of place, but all of them together created a really interesting narrative. This is very short, so you really have nothing to lose by picking it up!
A frustratingly vague but often haunting epistolary short story. I wasn't anticipating it to hew so closely to videogame emails and SCP entries, but I'll give it credit for being thematically richer than most of the shockbait horror it structurally parallels.
Ideas about the bodies of dehumanized (in more ways than one) workers in a future capitalist state are woven in without the didactic brutality so much contemporary scifi relies on. Characters cannot see outside the demands of the company anymore than readers can materialize the absent interviewer. Both are invisible absolutes, acknowledged but dismissed because who has time when you're working 12 hour shifts (to say nothing or the cosmic horror leaking from this cargo...).
I felt rather listless by the end of this. Even with the introduction of an honest to god plot in the third act it retains the abstract, nonlinear structure (it was not surprising to …
"God, you're such a glass-is-half-empty kind of person. Tell me something positive about this book."
me: "It only took 2 hours to read and now it's over."
Spaceship finds mysterious doohickeys and mysterious things happen. Androids and humans have existential crisis. Pseudo-mystery by telling through "interview recordings". All seen a million times, and this version is not very exciting, shallow and all over the place. Takes an effort to make a book this short seem to drag on forever.
Especially relevant to read in a pandemic the working world wants us to believe is in the past
The rather detailed blurb says far more about the plot of this self-consciously odd little book, than the actual text does. I'm not sure exactly what to do with this book, or what I think of it.
It's short, almost a long short story, and made up of short, almost entirely under one page, "STATEMENT"s, with a very few other things to set up the frame.
It's about a starship, probably, about mortal humans and the perhaps-immortal AI humanoids they've created, about what humanness is, what longing is, and how we might relate to enigmatic alien objects.
And it approaches all of these things mostly obliquely, indirectly, through hints and implications. Which can, I think, be either fascinating, or unsatisfying. Or both!
