The Employees - Mille feuilles

Paperback, 125 pages

Published Sept. 20, 2020 by Lolli Editions.

ISBN:: 978-1-9999928-8-0

(1 review)

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things—warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory—even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

3 editions

V171 reviewed The Employees by Olga Ravn

Review of 'The Employees' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

STATEMENT 084

"...I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught under my nails like fish eggs. Then, with a popping sound, new ones appear where I scratched the other ones away. I feel that this has something to do with the objects in the rooms, but I don't know how. There's something about their smoothness in relation to my skin...I got the impression that one of the objects wanted to take my skin away from me..."

The Employees is a short novel comprised of numbered interviews with "Employees" of the Six-Thousand ship, an exploration vessel whose full purpose is mostly unknown, but one of its functions is to house some strange objects that are recovered from an unknown place. Through the interviews with the employees, we get a vague idea of these mysterious objects which may or …

STATEMENT 084

"...I dream that there are hundreds of black seeds in my skin, and when I scratch at them they get caught under my nails like fish eggs. Then, with a popping sound, new ones appear where I scratched the other ones away. I feel that this has something to do with the objects in the rooms, but I don't know how. There's something about their smoothness in relation to my skin...I got the impression that one of the objects wanted to take my skin away from me..."

The Employees is a short novel comprised of numbered interviews with "Employees" of the Six-Thousand ship, an exploration vessel whose full purpose is mostly unknown, but one of its functions is to house some strange objects that are recovered from an unknown place. Through the interviews with the employees, we get a vague idea of these mysterious objects which may or not be alive. However we quickly learn about some of the tensions among the crew as some of them are humans (from earth) and some are "humanoid" or constructed humans, designed to not age and whose consciousness can be uploaded and downloaded. There seems to be a schism rising between these two groups of employees that comes to a dangerous head.

What a fascinating little implication of a story. I loved the interview format that seemed to swing between sometimes quirky, sometimes horrific little anecdotes, and insight into the status of the mission and life on the Six-Thousand ship. It hints at much larger goings on, but the author keeps the reader just out of reach of the full context. Some of the interviews can feel a bit silly or out of place, but all of them together created a really interesting narrative. This is very short, so you really have nothing to lose by picking it up!