Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the
Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members 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 becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, 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. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.