employees a workplace novel of the 22nd century

Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?” Ambiguity is everything: “I don’t know if I’m human anymore. The novel is by turns queasily exact about what is seen-skin pitted like pomegranate, an object’s furrows oozing some nameless balm-and willfully obscure. 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. This gorgeous, evocative novel is well worth the effort. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby.Īn achingly beautiful mosaic of fragile characters managing their longing, pain, and alienation.

What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. A tantalizing puzzle you can never quite solve. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of artīeautiful, sinister, gripping. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human… This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space.Įverything I’m looking for in a novel. The actual business of the Six Thousand Ship is nevertheless wholly modern: resource extraction, as employees make occasional excursions to harvest commodities known only as 'objects.' These soon come to derail-delightfully-both the ship’s functioning and its crew’s philosophizing.Ī deeply sensory book, suffused with aroma and alert to tactility. Like the figures of an epic, the workers seem composed of equal parts fate and randomness, automation and rebellion. The Employees feels close to Greek mythology.

Employees a workplace novel of the 22nd century