Honestly no clue how to rate this one, but I think I liked it. It's a novel(la?) entirely built out of prose-poetry-feeling little interview transcripts in space workplace of the 22nd century and I guess understandably at first this did not grab me, I was thinking 'inoffensive' was going to be the best thing I had to say about it. Then there's an inciting incident - half? 2/3rds? of the way through, and I was all in. I got very absorbed. I think this is partly that the onboarding process for the storytelling method took a while to hook me, but also the fact that I'm just more interested in some themes over others. "mortality & humanity & permanency or lack thereof in the face of [spoiler]" is far more interesting to me than "workplace conditions in the 22nd century fucking miserable". Obviously that's oversimplifying it a bit sdgjdsgj but that's a right-feeling explanation for my own reaction to this book. Glad I read it, if only because I feel like my horizons have been forcefully broadened

Through a series of short interviews, the combined human and humanoid crew of the Six-Thousand Ship offer insight into their lives aboard the corporate vessel. They touch upon everything from the mundanities of their occupations to deeper philosophical issues related to their respective existences. At first, the abstract nature of the entries and the lack of tangible personalities makes it difficult to connect with the material beyond the interesting premise, but as things progressive, one can’t help but be drawn in by the emotions conveyed and the metaphysical questions posed. By the halfway mark, I was all in as things started to go sideways for certain members of the crew forcing the board of directors overseeing the mission from Earth to take action. A thought-provoking contemplation on what it means to be human.

Thank you Olga Ravn, Book*hug Press and Netgalley for this free copy in exchange for a review.

I couldn't get very far into this one, because it made no sense. There is a difference between abstract, and just plain inexplicably nonsensical. Maybe this is just a poor translation from the original, and it needs to be translated better.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize (given to translated books), “The Employees” is a short science-fiction novel by Danish author Olga Ravn which tells the story of a spaceship manned by humans and humanoids (basically a kind of artificially “grown” human) and the consequences of their discovery of alien lifeforms on a planet. Both types of crewmembers begin to become attached to the aliens and start yearning for things and people they left behind on Earth whilst trying to maintain their strictly controlled productivity levels. This inevitably leads to conflict.
Now this is not a straightforward novel. It is told in the form of written “statements” taken from interviews with the crew during the unfolding of the story. This works quite well, and a palpable tension is built as the story is told through these snippets; some are a couple of pages long, others just one sentence. You will not know who is talking to begin with, but after a while a few different characters can be discerned, and you will come to understand who they are and the parts they play in the story.
I am not going to spoil the ending, but it would not take a genius to work out what happens. Even so, this book is a short but imaginative and often quietly profound examination of the dominance of work in our lives and ultimately what it means to be human.