The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize (given to translated books), “The Employees” is a short (about 135 pages) science-fiction novel by Danish author Olga Ravn which tells the story of a spaceship manned by humans and humanoids (basically a kind of artificially “grown” human) and the consequences of their discovery of alien lifeforms on a planet. Both types of crewmembers begin to become attached to the aliens and start yearning for things and people they left behind on Earth whilst trying to maintain their strictly controlled productivity levels. This inevitably leads to conflict.Now this is not a straightforward novel. It is told in the form of written “statements” taken from interviews with the crew during the unfolding of the story. This works quite well, and a palpable tension is built as the story is told through these snippets; some are a couple of pages long, others just one sentence. You will not know who is talking to begin with, but after a while a few different characters can be discerned, and you will come to understand who they are and the parts they play in the story.I am not going to spoil the ending, but it would not take a genius to work out what happens. Even so, this book is a short but imaginative and often quietly profound examination of the dominance of work in our lives and ultimately what it means to be human.

Cannot comment on the book itself as the Kindle format rendered it unreadable. The book is formatted in landscape rather than portrait, for some reason, so the text on Kindle Paperwhite is too small to read comfortably.

Missed the interview with the author at the online EIBF but was intrigued by the premise. It's a series of brief snippets out of which the story grows. Very readable.

Loved the understated narrative and zen like oddness of the story and characters, a thoughtful work. Over too soon, so suggest read slowly.Love the minimalist book design as well, well suited to the story.

Cracking book. Thoughtful, contemplative, soulful, elegant and unexpected. Beautiful.

This was just stunning. If you like weird, fragmentary scifi this is a MUST

I came to this book through workplace bookclub and wanted to read it. Once, on my Kindle, I realised something is wrong. Kindle automatically forces it into landscape mode. There's no way to change it, to change letter size. There's nothing to change! Meanwhile letters are tiny, the text takes like 1/3 of the screen. Words overlap each other.I can't say anything about the actual content, but the format simply doesn't work on Kindle Paperwhite.

What a weird and wonderful little book! Imagine, if you will, an HR report comprising interview statements following an incident in a futuristic workplace, spun into a highly conceptualised sci-fi drama, by way of Alan Dean Foster's Alien, Michael Crichton's Sphere and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?... whacky, eh? But it is also rather brilliant.The statements are generally pretty sketchy and the anxiety of the interviewees is almost palpable as they answer the questions put to them about the goings on aboard the Six-Thousand Ship and on the surface of New Discovery. Intriguingly, the interviewers' side of the conversations is not recorded, until the summation near the end of the book, so it is up to the reader to fill in the gaps, and it's all the better because you are never quite sure why they have gone to New Discovery in the first place. In fact, the stark nature of the whole book means it is up to you to join the dots yourself, and I found this very enjoyable - it's as if the author gives you permission to let you imagination run riot!Although the witness reports are rather brief, and in some cases only a scant few lines, as the book progresses they build a chilling picture. You are aware that the experiment being carried out by this mission has gone seriously awry, precipitated by the arrival of the mysterious objects, and the tension mounts splendidly to an ending that serves as somewhat of a warning to us all. Woven into the plot are some very philosophical and thought-provoking themes, some of which are particularly poignant - such as, the yearning of the human crew members for what they have left behind, and the longing to be "more" and desire to survive of their humanoid co-workers.This is a disconcerting and disquieting book and I take my hat off to the translator Martin Aitken for his stellar (please pardon the pun) work here in producing a such a powerful work in a language other than the original. It is one that I will be mulling over in the wee small hours of the morning when sleep refuses to come, though perhaps, this is better than the nightmares that might otherwise be inspired by the subject matter!