The trouble seems to come from the objects, but the problems they are causing prove elusive.
Like in Lem’s Solaris, major problems soon emerge on the space ship. There is a the me in this book of the impersonal environment focused on productivity alone vs. What you call found, discovered, is your own point of origin”, writers another. I name them one by one, and in each case I utter my own name…What you call made is your own work. As if they don’t actually exist on their own, but only in the idea of each other…The language is that they’re many, that they’re not one, that one of them is the reiteration of all of them”, writes one employee. They emit a strange hum and display a sense of unity: “ It’s as if at any time, one of them can always be the others. We find out that the objects collected on New Discovery are alive, enigmatic, fascinating, and that their appearance varies. Though the statements aim to be objective, they end up to be similar to personal diaries of the crew members involved. This means we have to find out what happened on the ship through the impressions of others and get to know the curious “objects” only through the peculiar effect they exercise on the crew. The reader has to piece together the story through the individual statements given by numerous employees of the Six-T housand Ship. Dick, The Employees offers a visceral, uncanny reading experience. Probably influenced in some way by both Lem’s sci-fi Solaris and the fiction of Philip K. Composed entirely of (increasingly disturbing) statements given by the employees on the Six-Thousand Ship, The Employees by Danish author Olga Ravn may have a rather “boring” title, but this book is anything but that. Little the crew suspects that these objects will have a powerful, unforeseen effect on each member of the personnel onboard, and that means on both humans and humanoid robots. When the crew stops to explore a previously unknown planet named New Discovery, they take certain live “objects” on board with them.
This book, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, focuses on our distant dystopian future and on the Six-Thousand Ship, a space vessel on an exploration mission into space. “ You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have.” Jose Saramago
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