the employees a workplace novel of the 22nd century

Many of the transcripts share this anxious tone, with speakers deliberating over what it means to be alive. Uploaded with software perfected across generations, these machine laborers turn querulously to their overlords for explanation: “Could I be a human if you called me one?” Readers can only guess which character is behind which statement, a situation further complicated by the fact that some members of the crew are humanoids rather than “born” humans.

For the reader, too, time functions like a loose knob, to be rolled and fiddled with desultorily you can read The Employees according to pagination or statement number, but the ending never changes, a narrative deadlock that Ravn pulls off with grace. “It’s impossible to maintain any sense of direction,” one worker complains. Separated from quaint, earthly time, the crew initially adheres to Six Thousand’s on-board schedule, but it is soon apparent that the capitalist workday is just as disorienting as a total temporal vacuum. Ravn’s novel is a record of their explanatory “statements” to the authorities, with the transcripts presented, fittingly, out of chronological order. The ship is undergoing an internal audit-corporate bureaucracy being its own timeless premise-because its employees have taken to acting strangely they’re lying down in the middle of tasks, whispering conspiratorially in the canteen. Here, there is only the Six Thousand Ship (a vessel carrying a crew of workers) and New Discovery (the planet it orbits). Ravn’s novel of space travel and labor unrest is set in the not-too-distant future, which is as bleak as you might imagine. Olga Ravn’s The Employees is a fine take on this dystopian problem. Few places are as interminable as outer space, which urgently raises the question of where one is while rendering the natural follow-up-for how long?-moot. This is true of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which mad astronauts prove incapable of distinguishing between past and present, as well the Swedish poem and film Aniara, about a spaceship destined for a future of endless drift-which is to say, no future at all. The accounting of minutes and hours is too petty, too human, for the vast distance between one star and another some genres just won’t accommodate the clockface. IN STORIES ABOUT INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, space usually wins out over time.

The employees a workplace novel of the 22nd century