• The Employees

  • A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
  • By: Olga Ravn
  • Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
  • Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (75 ratings)

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The Employees  By  cover art

The Employees

By: Olga Ravn
Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
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Publisher's Summary

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.

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.

©2018, 2021 Olga Ravn & Martin Aitken Gyldendal (P)2022 New Directions Publishing Corp.

What listeners say about The Employees

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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Lost on the way to a story

The book is prose, disconnected and almost stream of consciousness. There is a good story hidden in there somewhere - if you have the patience to wait… and wait… and wait.

1 person found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Didn’t find the humor BUT …

It was actually haunting (imho) the text stayed with me, it made me uncomfortable (in an existential sort of way.)

Not the best thing I ever listened to - BUT - it is worth the time and the discomfort.

1 person found this helpful

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No clue what was this about

I came out of the book with only a very vague se sense of what was going on. Must be one of the most hermetic novels I came across, and not in a good way.

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Some insight into work

Elliptical narrative. Why were the "objects" being collected? What caused the conflict on the ship?

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Unusual, Dark Science Fiction

Based on the title, I was surprised that this story takes place aboard a spaceship in deep space. The “employees” are robots, humanoids, and humans. It’s very unusual in the way it’s structured and has a dark, haunting vibe to it as it unfolds. The mystery of what was going on kept me intrigued. I recommend it for anyone who likes dark, unusual, sci-fi.

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Very sad, terribly depressing

Not exactly what I need to read at the moment. The author must be a very unusual person to write such a dreary tale.

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  • Roly
  • 05-30-23

Beware of what we wish for

An unassumingly bleak view of a futuristic world, as both humans and humanoids suffer from deprivation of the personal and the intimate. Related in short stark statements, the almost lone identifiable character seems progressively to lose hope and commitment.
A wake up call to cherish our humanity and reject AI