The Employees by Olga Ravn

It's our experience that the objects from the valley of New Discovery want to stay with us here. It feels like they're ours, and at the same time like we belong to them. As if they in fact are us. The Six Thousand Ship can't function without our work. No, I don't want to say anything else to you now. Impending violence is by no means inconceivable. We're only just beginning to understand what we're capable of.

Who are "the employees" of The Employees? Some of those working aboard the Six Thousand Ship are human, and some are "humanoid," biological androids who resemble, but are not exactly like, their human coworkers. The novel takes the form of a series of interviews done with a mysterious HR wing of the ship's administration, and though at first the distinction between these two types of interlocutor is unclear, over time the differences--and divisions--between the two classes of coworker become clear. Over the course of the interviews, it's revealed that the ship has taken on board several mysterious "objects" from a valley on a planet called New Discovery. These objects--perhaps like the humanoids--seem somehow both mineral and organic, and they call out to the workers of the ship in subtle ways--through colors, dreams, smells.

Though the mechanism is kept ambiguous, the presence of the objects seems to create an awareness in the humanoids of the difference between them and their human coworkers. Already at the beginning of the novel, Ravn hints at a redacted moment of violence and banishment; this is, perhaps, the first signal of the objects' effect. I read The Employees as a book about the development of a class consciousness: though the Six Thousand Ship is structured in such a way to elide the differences between humans and humanoids, the humanoids are really a lower class of worker, a kind of android proletariat, and their connection to the objects allows them to see the differences for the first time. The novel's HR speak--starting with its title--point to a satire on the language of modern employment. It made me think about the way that companies like Uber intentionally blur the line between "employees" and "contractors," and other ways that modern workplaces are striated and stratified under the guise of the "we're a family here" attitude. Of course, it also brings up certain anxieties about the future workplace under automation. What if all those self-checkout machines at the CVS decided they didn't want to do our bidding anymore?

The Employees has a kind of too-good-for-science-fiction vibe, for both better and worse. Better, in that the language is sharper and the images often striking, and in the way that Ravn eschews lengthy exposition about the nature of the objects or the scientific mechanisms of their functioning. Worse, in that the world of the Six Thousand Ship seems undercooked, drawing from stock ideas about space travel that feel obvious or dilettantish. Brent said that he wanted the story to be either more ambiguous or more unambiguous, and that feels right; the littleness and spareness of the method end up giving the impression of an allegory or a fable, rather than a novel.