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

Olga Ravn, The Employees: A workplace novel 

of the 22nd century, Trans. by Martin Aitken, 

Lolli, 2020.

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres 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 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, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

“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

”If you love plot-heavy, character-driven SFF, look away now. The Employees is set on a spaceship staffed by humans and humanoids looking after some objects found on the planet New Discovery. Are the objects sentient? Are the humanoids becoming more human through contact with them? Is working the same as living? What is the light in the corridor? 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

“Samuel Beckett if he had 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

As the title already suggests, The Employees focuses very much on function and role, with practically none of the (many) characters identified by any sort of name, with role or position the defining attribute -- 'Cadet 04', 'Cadet 08'. (A notable exception is a creator-figure from their past they refer to, a Dr Lund; among the few others is: "Janice and Sonia", who isn't even an (or at least doesn't see herself as) individual: "I'm not one, but two".) The sub-title, too, emphasizes the setting, and the characters' function, as workers: A workplace novel of the 22nd century. The locale -- a spaceship called the Six-Thousand Ship, exploring a place far from Earth called New Discovery -- is considerably more than simple workplace for its passengers; indeed, it's not just their habitat but, essentially, their entire world -- but it is presented very much here as, in essence, the hive for these worker bees.

A brief introductory chapter explains what the bulk of the novel consists of: statements: "collected over a period of 18 months, during which the committee interviewed the employees with a view to gaining insight into how they related to the objects and the rooms in which they were placed". These statements are offered without any descriptive or other annotation -- or any questions or prompts by the committee --, and consist solely of the employees' own words. The statements are numbered but not attributed to specific employees by name or other identifier; some do mention their specific roles -- the one who keeps a register of the new arrivals; the local funeral director who gets rid of "terminated workers" and left-over bodies; etc.. The statements are presented in near but, oddly, not entirely numerical order -- which also reveals that not all statements have been included in this final report.

For all the seeming anonymous sameness of so many of the employees, there seem, in fact, to be fundamental differences between the two groups they are composed of:

There's humans, and then there's humanoids. Those who were born and those who were made. Those who are going to die and those who aren't. Those who are going to decay and those who aren't going to decay.

The humanoids are remarkably human-like (among the few small differences: they have no reproductive and sexual organs (as these could serve no purpose)), and there's a distinct blurring of identity here, many on the ship having difficulty in dealing with their differences, even as the powers that be try to maintain the distinction with separate sections on the ship for the two categories. As one respondent observes: "You tell me: this is not a human, but a co-worker", as the powers that be would prefer them to focus on their function, as cogs in the machine, and simply accept (rather than concern themselves with) the human/humanoid distinction, but their different -- yet oh so similar -- natures complicate matters.

Another respondent points out:

I know I'm only humanoid and that it's not the same. But I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts. Perhaps all that's need is for you to change my status in your documents ? Is it a question of name ? Could I be human if you called me so ?

The confusion goes both ways: another employee reports having met Dr Lund before the ship departed -- and:

Even though I was born and brought up and my documents all said human, there was something about his behaviour that made me think he didn't consider me an equal, and for a few brief and terrifying seconds I felt I was artificial, made, nothing but a humanoid machine of flesh and blood. My maker's screen. Fabricated, conducted.

Another tells the committee:

I don't know if I'm human anymore. Am I human ? Does it say in your files what I am ?

Part of the problem is that the humanoids, in particular, seem, in their thinking, to be becoming almost too human. Some struggle with that, understanding that it's not what was originally intended; one humanoid explains: "I want to be a good employee, I want to make good choices. But how can I tell if I'm following the programme correctly ?" The humanoid is disturbed by what its mind(-equivalent) is coming up with:

Why do I have these thoughts if the reason I'm here is primarily to increase production ? From what perspective are these thoughts productive ? Was there an error in the update ? If there was, I'd like to be rebooted.

It is this blurring of lines, of what makes humans human -- of the idea of humanity -- that increasingly is challenged here, as it becomes clear where these interrogations, and the fates of those of those aboard the ship, are headed. This eventually includes efforts to "dismantle the humanoid employees" -- a committee is set up to do that, but fails -- and then a more comprehensive ... workplace closure that is put into effect; creepily, that, too, is a somewhat drawn-out procedure, with a few last statements still trickling in very late in the process.

The exact nature of the work is a bit murky, but basically involves the collection of objects which are then stored on the ship, in dedicated rooms. The characters also relate to the objects -- seeing them not merely as some sort of specimens, but rather finding themselves with, for example, "a sense of attachment" to them. This appears to be another of the problems in the workplace: that the employees can not behave simply like cogs and go through their motions, but become emotionally involved in their work.

On the one hand, this has some advantages. The humans on the crew apparently often have difficulty with what they've left behind on Earth, missing much in this environment -- down to something as simple as being able to go out shopping:

Shopping had a kind of numbing effect on me, and now that it's something I no longer do, I've started having thoughts and feelings that have turned out to be sad.

(Yes, both humans and humanoids find a considerable downside to simple introspection and awareness of their condition .....)

One crew member's responsibility was to see that the humans: "don't buckle under to nostalgia and become catatonic" -- as:

We saw a lot of that to begin with. To everyone's surprise, the objects in the rooms have shown to alleviate the discomfort of these nostalgia attacks, and the human employees whose functions allow them to get out into the valley on New Discovery quickly show signs of improvement and lifted spirits.

The Employees is a darkish vision -- and, of course, not merely one of a possible future but rather of the contemporary workplace. Even in its deliberate vagueness, the work itself seems far removed from most one might imagine people engaging in in our day and age, and yet in many ways its only a(n intensely) heightened variation of the contemporary-familiar. The conditions are extreme in many ways, including in the isolation and anonymity they work in, and yet not that far removed from familiar experience. The inclusion of artificial intelligences that are practically but still not entirely human adds another interesting dimension.

Ravn's approach -- the narrative is fragmentary, with limited description of many of the goings-on (or, for example, explanations of the purpose and goals of the mission, or who controls it) -- makes for a story that leaves much up to the reader, as it is easy to be tempted in to filling in some of the seeming blanks. Obviously, this isn't the kind of science fiction for those that like theirs to provide a fully-created world, but there's a lot to be said for Ravn's very open presentation, and how she presents the various issues she raises for readers to consider.

A creative take; certainly of interest. -- M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/dansk/ravno.htm#ours

The Employees is one of those novels which is so rich in meaning that it can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Like the other books from Lolli Editions, the book’s structure contributes to the ‘less is more’ philosophy that this publisher encapsulates.

The setting is in the far future, where humanoids and humans work along each other. The book opens up with a series of page lone confessions/interviews of robots who took part in a space mission, which went awry. Think of Blade Runner (the 1982 version) meets the HAL segment of 2001 : A space odyssey.

On one hand The Employees could be a criticism of work hierarchies, the humanoids seem to notice that humans are a different rank and, despite claims of equality, humanoids work and suffer more. As what happens in strictly regimented societies , chaos will surface. In hindsight, one could say that the ship and all the goings on represent the problems that occur with humanity. A workplace novel of the 22nd century or do things never change?

However one other plot point which struck me is the dichotomy between humans and humanoids. The latter are constantly experiencing aspects of life we take for granted and also live in fear of being deprived (the dreaded off switch) from all this beauty. Who is the more human? person or robot?

The Employees proves that one can mix experimental structures and multilayered concepts and yet a heartfelt tale emerges. A minimal approach can lead to a maximal outcome. - The Bobosphere

https://thebobsphere.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/olga-ravn-martin-aitken-trans-the-employees-a-workplace-novel-of-the-22nd-century/

But it’s two novellas that exemplified for me this idea of oneiric labour as a route out of null exploitative employment: the first, The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century by Danish writer Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken and published by translation specialists Lolli Editions, takes its inspiration from a Barbara Kruger art installation, and is absolutely what its title describes insofar as the workplace is a spaceship that’s also an art gallery, and the novel’s form is that of disordered entries from a report by the parent company’s investigators concerned that the human and humanoid employees are becoming indistinguishable. More on this elusive text in a moment.

.....The Employees’ characters are rarely gendered: some mention experiences such as child-bearing or -rearing, but in the same breath may question whether these are implanted memories.

Both the human / humanoid distinction and binary gender collapse productively and, in fact, revolutionarily, as those employees who are – or think they are, or accept they are – humanoid take over the ship. They are acting in concert in response to a disorientation produced by a number of strange objects taken on board from the planet New Discovery. The objects produce multisensory, and even synaesthetic, apprehensions in some employees and not others, sense-memory triggers that cross the human-humanoid boundary to dispense with the Voight-Kampff test.

The Blade Runner reference is not plucked from nowhere. Here’s Statement 097 in full, echoing the famous ‘tears in rain’ monologue as well as the film’s rain-soaked climate dystopia:

You want to know what I think about this arrangement? I think you look down on me. The way I see it, you’re a family that’s built a house. And from the warm rooms of that house you now look out at the pouring rain… I’m standing in the rain that you think can never fall on you. I become one with that rain. I’m the storm you shelter from. This entire house is something you built just to avoid me. So don’t come to me and say I play no part in human lives.

Feelings are feelings (as Roy Batty is arguing), and (as queer feminist Yvonne Rainer says) feelings are – like the impossible objects – facts, however much colonial capitalism supresses and disputes that.

It is in working with – as guards and cleaners, rather than being viewers, curators or scholars – these disorienting objects that the effects occur. Making visible the often-invisibilised labour attendant on producing a cultural sector with which we can engage critically and for pleasure feels especially pointed and poignant after a year when many wealthy national art institutions such as Tate and Southbank Centre made their lowest-paid staff redundant, especially cleaners, security, retail and hospitality workers who were often already on precarious contracts. 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.

The Employees ends with the humanoid survivors of the uprising going planet-side, to experience an organic existence and ecosystem about which they only have implanted memories. It’s a quietly, deeply subversive idea, a bleaker conclusion than Finna’s, almost Beckettian. The penultimate, unnumbered speaker says: ‘If I pull up some grass from the earth and keep it in my hand from now on, will there be a chance then? No, we’re given new bodies. My dead body will have to lie here with the grass in its fist.’

It’s a reminder of the all-too-often inorganic imaginaries of space fiction, a sterile scientism that Star Trek: Discovery has disrupted with its mycelial network and, this season, with a greenhouse ship reminiscent of and also redemptive of Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972). The paramount survival of a galactic seed vault lush with vegetation (including medicinal plants) takes place in an episode titled ‘Die Trying’ (3.5): multispecies co-existence, indigenous and Black leadership, and ecological urgency are keynotes of the third season. It will be fascinating to see whether this eco-consciousness will be maintained in subsequent seasons. -So Mayer

https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/01/17/grass-in-its-fist/

Bearing in mind the fact that September 30, 2020 marks the International Translation Day, we’ve decided to share with you a treasure of translated fiction: Olga Ravn’s masterful novel titled The Employees, which was translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken and will be published by Lolli Editions.

The Employees has been compared to Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, and it truly builds upon a foundation of a similar grandeur, for Ravn is a remarkable writer – kudos to the translator for managing to transpose the beauty of her style into English. The work is of a fragmentary character, with its magnificently crafted structure revealing information regarding the plot and the protagonists in forms of statements that are being issued over a period of 18 months to a certain committee. As the novel progresses, one becomes aware of the layers of meaning, which are somewhat shuffled, and are slowly being revealed in a non-linear manner. This choice of narration is by no means an ordinary one, it actually represents one of the bravest writing endeavours that I’ve encountered in literature, whose success is located in the tension that’s being built as the statements progress. They are being issued by the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship: humans and humanoids. There are certain ‘objects’ that are being discussed, and the crew’s relation to them appears to be a manner of great concern that is slowly being revealed to the readers.

With the aim of not ruining the plot for you, but letting you delve into this masterpiece, I’d like to point out several topics that are discussed and analyzed in The Employees with great delicacy and insight, and are some of the biggest questions to be posed in contemporary literature, taking into account the blurring of lines between work and free time, and the overbearing idea of unlimited productivity. It makes us probe into what it truly means to be human, as well as to question whether loneliness only constitutes a feature of the human mind, or it can also be felt by fictive humanoid beings whose language becomes increasingly imbued by emotions as the statements progress.

Nearing the end, while reading Statement 174, I was reminded of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s project The OA, which held the same grandeur in my eyes. The sensibility of the three creators: Marling, Batmanglij and Ravn pores into their works, for the two formats are so deeply attuned to the intricacies of the mind and its manifold layers, as well as to the visual element, for Ravn’s novel plays with strong and moving images, and as you progress with the statements, the ‘film’ that’s being played in your mind becomes increasingly chilling, which is also the case while watching The OA.

“Does a thought count? A sufficiently negative thought? For instance, I might start thinking you’re not infallible, that you might be prone to error, but then I feel angry with myself and tell myself it must be me there’s something wrong with. Why do I have all these thoughts if the job I’m doing is mainly technical? Why do I have these thoughts if the reason I’m here is primarily to increase production? From what perspective are these thoughts productive? Was there an error in the update? If there was, I’d like to be rebooted.”

Olga Ravn’s novel undoubtedly pertains to the arena of the most original contemporary novels, and will speak multitudes to every reader willing to listen to its intricate layers, and I could not recommend it more. - Sanja Gligorić

http://anglozine.com/review-the-employees-a-workplace-novel-of-the-22nd-century-by-olga-ravn/

Billed as a ‘workplace novel for the 22nd century’, Olga Ravn’s The Employees takes science fiction down a new path. Structured as a series of witness statements from the crew - both human and non-human - of the Six-Thousand Ship as it orbits the planet New Discovery, it charts the impact of some strange objects taken on board and the effect they have on those that come into contact with them. At its heart is a fundamental question: what does it really mean to be human? Each short testimony has its own answer, as those who were born and those who were made all start to question their roles and what it means to them to be alive. Both powerful and poetic, the chilling prescience and emotional eloquence of Ravn’s prose is wonderfully rendered in Martin Aitken’s translation. 

Life on board the Six-Thousand Ship is governed by work. The logic of productivity and the demands of the organisation are paramount, regulating every aspect of days and nights. Food has become simply ‘nourishment’ to be taken in at appropriate times. Clothes are ‘capsules’, designed (with an eerie relevance to our own times) to protect ‘not only whoever’s wearing it, but also co-workers who enter the wearer’s intimate sphere.’ Holograms have taken the place of biological children, left far behind on Earth, while fellow crew members are no more and no less than co-workers. While humanoid employees are identical to humans in their appearance, they do not have human emotions: they are programmed for work and uploaded at regular intervals. Yet it’s clear, from the very start of the book, that attachments have formed between humans and humanoids. Already there is the question of what actually distinguishes human from humanoid, and we see humanoids begin to wonder what it would be like to be fully human. ‘Perhaps all that’s needed is for you to change my status in your documents? Is it a question of name? Could I be human if you called me so?’

The objects brought from New Discovery are an unsettling intrusion into this sterile environment, as all those who come into contact with them begin to inexplicably long for warmth and intimacy. Human employees feel nostalgia for their long-ago life on Earth. Humanoid employees begin to display emotional reactions that are seen as ‘deviations’ in their programming, errors that must be fixed on the next update before productivity is damaged. All are affected by the sensuality of the objects. In particular, the scent of them provokes reactions: we get the feeling that in the logical, clinical space of the Six-Thousand Ship, there is no space for the senses unless they can improve workflow. One employees states that, ‘The first smell that disappeared was the smell of outside, of the weather, you could say…the last smell that disappeared was the smell of vanilla. That, and the fragrance of my child…’

There is only one named character in the book: Dr Lund, the scientist responsible for the development of the humanoids and for the Six-Thousand Ship project. No longer an active part of the program, he nevertheless becomes a touchstone, a focal point of blame for when things start to go wrong. No other character is named or given prominence. Each witness statement is simply given a number. The crew members are also known by number, in an erasing of identity that contrasts sharply with the increasing awareness and personality that they display in their testimonies. The ‘organisation’ and ‘Homebase’ are anonymous, faceless yet omnipresent, determined to maintain the status quo no matter the cost. In this sense the book can be read as a scathing (and timely) critique of the late capitalist system and the systems that perpetuate it today, and it asks how far we are prepared to go in the name of productivity. Do we strive for efficiency until there is nothing else left, stripping ourselves of all the emotions and flaws and quirks that make us human? Do we really want a system in which we have to ask, ‘I don’t know if I’m human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?’

The climax of The Employees is horribly inevitable. Yet it also leaves us with a shred of hope - not from the human crew members, but from the humanoids who, given the chance to leave the Six-Thousand Ship for New Discovery, do so despite knowing that they might not be re-uploaded as a result. For a humanoid, this means death, but a quote from the early pages of the novel is equally relevant here. ‘Is this problem human? If so, I would like to keep it.’ - Elodie Barnes

https://lunate.co.uk/reviews/the-employees-by-olga-ravn

“In this science fiction novel, nourished by poetry and symbolism, Olga Ravn shows how life only has meaning through death. An illuminating message at a time when the apostles of transhumanism are trying to circumvent what they see, wrongly, as an end and not a beginning.” – Alice Develey, Le Figaro

“A powerful and philosophical sci-fi experiment from a near-distant future, exploring what it means to be human and alive.” – Børsen

“As beautiful as it gets: Beauty and longing in the infinite universe.” – Berlingske

“An unsettling, endlessly dizzying work.” – Politiken

“A disquieting, delectable reading experience and one of the best answers for a contemporary novel I have read in a long time: ‘Is this problem human? If so, I would like to keep it.’” – Kristeligt Dagblad

“Olga Ravn has long since manifested herself as one of the most important and influential writers in Danish contemporary literature. Her new book is a spirited blend of cyborgs, living stones and productivity optimisations. A most thought-provoking, literary sci-fi novel.” – Jyllands-Posten

“The Employees is inspired by Personal Development Planning and the way we speak to each other at work. Turns out, the language of streamlining is terrifying.”- Danish Broadcasting Corporation

“Olga Ravn’s new novel from the future is a thought-provoking warning letter to society.” – Information

OLGA RAVN (b. 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her novel Celestine appeared to critical acclaim in 2015. 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.