I believe in the future. I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it. I believe in unfathomable quantities of nourishment.
Olga Ravn’s The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, is one of a few books I decided to (try to) round off 2024 with. like Chung Bora’s Cursed Bunny, it was on a Booker Prize shortlist, and as a result I went into it a bit wary. fortunately, as with Cursed Bunny my wariness was unwarranted: it’s very good, though I wasn’t quite as blown away by this as I would have liked to be (or as I was by Cursed Bunny).
the novel is composed of a series of numbered “statements” collected by the crew/employees of the Six Thousand Ship, orbiting a distant planet where they have found a set of enigmatic objects that both unsettle and comfort those who interact with them. at first, the statements primarily concern the objects, but as the novel progresses it becomes apparent that in fact the interviewers are specifically investigating the deteriorating relationship between the human employees and the humanoid employees — Čapek-style biological constructs whose experiences are periodically “uploaded” to servers, from which they can be copied into new bodies at need.
R.U.R. seems to me to be perhaps the strongest influence on this book, not just in the specific form of the humanoids but also in many of its specific concerns: the boundary between human and humanoid / “natural” and “artificial”, reproduction, labor. there’s also an element of generation ship narrative, as the human employees, in particular, signed onto the Six Thousand Ship knowing that they would never see Earth, or their families, again. it is a novel of unanswered questions: many of the statements offer theories, some tentative and some definitively articulated, about aspects of the crew’s situation — what is causing the rift between humans and humanoids, the nature of the objects, the ethics of humanoid life, the meaning of death when humanoids can be revived in a new body, and more — but without ever offering definite conclusions. Ravn invites readers to sit with uncertainty and to be unsettled.
most of the statements are short, with only a few longer than a page and only I think two longer than two pages. by way of example, I’m just going to give one of my favorites; I think this is probably the most effective way to convey the effect of the book. statement 071:
I’m starting to feel disloyal toward the organization and it pains me because there’s no place for me other than inside the organization. Here, on the Six Thousand Ship, I know you don’t wish anything bad for me as long as I submit to the workflow and remain loyal to the values of the organization. No, I don’t want to put anything forward that might be construed as disloyal criticism. That’s why I’ve come to see you today, in the hope that there might be some other function in which I’d have less responsibility, without having to relate to the overall workflow to the same extent. I’d like to be assigned to that kind of position. I realize the abilities I’ve been allocated won’t be fully exploited in that case, but does the pain I feel not mean anything? I venture to suggest that such pain impacts the quality of my work and moreover may negatively impact the work of my colleagues. OK. I see. So I wouldn’t have the power of speech? No, I understand. I hereby consent. When
oof!
the way the statements move between the everyday, the routine, and the decidedly not routine (space exploration; strange objects; sudden violence) reminded me of Patricia McKillip at her best — the way the Riddle-Master trilogy moves between Morgon the farmer and Morgon the Star-Bearer; Nairn doing the dishes in The Bards of Bone Plain; the kitchen staff reading aloud from Atrix’s spellbook. the juxtaposition of the discourses of office work — workflow efficiency, coworker relations, etc. — with the science-fictional conflict between humans and humanoids. if the novel didn’t hit me as powerfully as I wanted it to, I think it’s because Ravn is maybe trying a bit too hard — this felt more like Booker Prize Science Fiction, if you will, than Cursed Bunny did. this isn’t a real negative, though; it’s just the difference between a 5/5 and a 4.5/5.
frankly, I also suspect that part of the problem was just that I wasn’t always able to keep my full attention on the book around the holidays: I think if I’d had the time and energy to sit down and read it through, perhaps aloud, in one sitting I might have felt like it was a 5/5. in any case, I highly recommend it if any of this sounds interesting to you / if you liked the style of the statement I quoted above!
if I were to offer one complaint it would be perhaps the most common thing that annoys me in translations, namely an overdeference to the original language’s punctuation that then doesn’t align with English usage — in this case (as in many others) in the form of a ton of comma splices. it’s not a huge deal, it just grates a little bit. stick some semicolons in there.
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