Workers, Soft Objects; Opinionated Objects
I read Olga Ravn's "The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century"
Creatures, how would you assess your adjustment to the new workflow? Creatures, were you begotten or made?
Creatures, can you provide some proof of your answer?
A few years ago I played this Dread game (Dread is my favorite rpg so far) where I was a secret AI or, you know, very sophisticated robot. I’d been hiding my nonhuman status, feeling lowkey guilt-ridden about both the hiding and the status, until the circumstances of the Dread game forced me to confront how far I was willing to go to protect my secret. The answer turned out to be Just enough to make me feel worse… not enough to make me safe. Not enough to make me think robots had ever been a very good idea. My sad robot survived those events, but when we were doing our character wrap-ups at the end I was like, “Yeah and I voted Space Conservative for the rest of my life.”
Olga Ravn’s 2018 novel The Employees (translated from the Danish in 2020 by Martin Aitken) is subtitled A workplace novel of the 22nd century, and the dedication thanks Lea Guldditte Hestelund, “for her installations and sculptures, without which this book would not exist.” It’s great—it’s a miniature, 120 brisk pages of elliptical interviews with the human and humanoid crew of a spaceship whose mission has, you’ll eventually realize, taken more than one disturbing turn. Maybe the trouble started when the crew landed on the planet New Discovery and picked up some objects:
It’s not hard to clean them. The big one, I think, sends out a kind of hum, or is it just something I imagine? Maybe that’s not what you mean? I’m not sure, but isn’t it female? The cords are long, spun from blue and silver fibers. They keep her up with a strap made of calf-colored leather with prominent white stitching. ...If I’m allowed to say something, I don’t think you should have her hung up all the time.
The themes here are not necessarily subtle—the employee as object, what it’s like to try to articulate all your deepest moral and metaphysical longings in terms of what promotes or degrades optimal work performance. The ultra-contemporary note is struck by the occasional evocations of romantic love as a dreamed-of, never-experienced haven from productivity. But these themes, which could easily become preachy, are tilted and examined from startling angles: what is born will die, but what is made goes on forever, resurrected in the reupload; humans are like the strangely emotional alien objects, and the alien objects are like the humanoids; when the robots start to make threats, will we even notice?
A motif of skin and things that are skinlike: hides, “biodraperies,” eczema, cleaning cloths. A motif of smells and memories of smells. A motif of child holograms and eggs, and broken eggs. “...I’m the only one the hides will allow to clean them.” “All of us are condemned to a dream of romantic love, even though no one I know loves in that way, or lives that kind of a life. Yet these are the dreams you’ve given us. I know the smell of oakmoss, but I don’t know what it feels like to the touch.”
A motif of hierarchies and pride: we learn to take pride in whatever is available, whatever identity no one can or will take from us, whether it’s “human” or “criminal.”
The mystery element provides specific pleasures, as you sort out what happened, why these interviews are being conducted and when. It’s part of why The Employees reminded me of that Dread game: a puzzle element always makes a book feel sort of interactive or gamelike. The plot involves politics, and the politics were satisfying and weird but did feel a bit less weird than the segments before the plot really swings into motion. The strange alien objects move to the background of the novel, which is too bad, I wanted more of those weird and fragrant objects, which exert such a pull—intentional? benevolent?—over both kinds of crewmembers.
Ravn is fantastic at the short interview form. There are several final lines that are unsettling, or even heartbreaking; there’s one that made me gasp. You could call The Employees microhorror woven into satire, though both of those genre classifications suggest a flatter tone than the novel really achieves. Another description would evoke one of those unearthly objects: The Employees has smooth grooves which ooze a sweet and viscous substance under planetlight.
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I enjoyed both reading Merlin Sheldrake’s fungus opus, Entangled Life, and writing this essay about it: “Sheldrake is out to convince you not only that you’ve never really understood mushrooms, but that you’ve never really understood yourself. Halfway through this book, I found myself thinking, Wait—am I a lichen? Have I been a lichen this whole time?”
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“A human-shaped robot” photographed by Oliver Duquesne, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.