144 pages
Published by New Directions.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Aboard the interstellar 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 deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. In chilling, crackling, and exhilarating prose, The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
Intriguing speculative fiction in the form of a series of testimonies by workers on a ship -- some of whom are human and some of whom are androids. It also feels like a museum exhibition catalog if it were written by museum workers who haven't been told anything about the exhibition. In its relatively few pages, Ravn manages to limn the boundaries between subject/object, animacy/inanimacy, and sensation, emotion, and perception.
