Are these things alive? Sentient? Happy or sad? Interviewees report mostly details and impressions, gleaned from their visits to the rooms where the objects are kept, or imprisoned. What can it mean, asks a baffled humanoid when reporting a conversation with a human coworker, to believe that “a person is more than just their work?”Īs for what this “work” entails, the crew is in charge of (or cares for) nineteen “objects” collected on the pastoral green planet New Discovery. Which is the more precarious and temporary position? Which the more authentic? Each group seems at times to envy the other, even as they remain mutually enigmatic. An italicized framing narrator tells us in blank managerial jargon that the committee’s interviews have taken place over eighteen months and are concerned with “reduction or enhancement of performance, task-related understanding, and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills.” A sort of class structure exists between human workers and their humanoid counterparts, except the hierarchy is unclear. In brief numbered statements delivered by the human and nonhuman crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a shadowy committee, Ravn seeds her narrative with direct and allegorical reflections on transhumanism, disappearing nature, and the ambiguities of being embodied.Īs the title implies, The Employees is at the same time a satire of the contemporary workplace I half expected a big reveal to the effect that the action was really taking place in an all-too-earthly Amazon warehouse. (It is the Danish writer’s second novel-she is also a poet, critic, and translator-and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.) Ravn’s plot depends too on the stock motif of a specimen-gathering spacecraft a long way from home, controls set for catastrophe. So it transpires in Olga Ravn’s laconic, discomposing The Employees. A sci-fi staple: if you invent a race of near-humanoid slaves, in time they will turn on you with vengeful intent, not to mention awkward existential questions. “Fucker” becomes “father” in later cuts of the film-unfortunate literalism. “I want more life, fucker!” says the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982) before he destroys the corporate scientist who made him. The Employees, by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken, New Directions, 125 pages, $ 19.95

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