The Employees
Translated by Martin Aitken.
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, while delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by the logic of productivity.
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Olga Ravn
Olga Ravn is a Danish author whose fiction has a habit of crossing boundaries: between literary fiction and science fiction, poetry and prose, history and the supernatural, the human body and the systems that attempt to control it. Whether writing about humanoid workers aboard a distant spacecraft or witchcraft in seventeenth-century Denmark, she uses the strange and speculative to examine questions that remain recognizably human.
Born in Copenhagen in 1986, Ravn emerged first as a poet before expanding into novels, criticism, translation, and experimental forms of writing. Poetry remains visible in the way she constructs her fiction. Her novels often resist straightforward storytelling, relying instead on fragments, testimonies, shifting voices, and unusual narrators to create stories that feel assembled from pieces of evidence.
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