Book Review #15: "The Employees" By Olga Ravn
Is there "objectivity" in humanity?
To begin: I apologize for my extended absence. As many of you know, I just started an English masters program and I needed time to adjust. Still, this newsletter means a lot to me and I have every intention of maintaining it during this time. I’ll just need you to bear with me!
🩸Grace
I have had a sci-fi girl summer and I predict it will turn into a sci-fi girl fall. This is pretty new for me. It’s not that I disliked science fiction before, but I’m usually hesitant when book shopping. The extended technical jargon and intense world-building make it difficult for me to really engage with a story. I found an easy segue via Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir–a fun and simple book–that has swayed my interest. I enjoyed it a lot, but I also found it boring. The story essentially boils down to a heroic protagonist saving the world from extraterrestrial doom. It has been done before. I craved something different that still maintained the zany possibilities of science fiction. Instead of rereading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I opted for Bora Chung’s Your Utopia. You can read my review of that here.
This journey brought me to Olga Ravn’s novella The Employees. Like Chung, it’s translated fiction about a future where humanoids and humans exist together. Short employee entries make up Ravn’s story–each from an anonymous worker aboard the Six Thousand Ship. The ship’s crew comprises of human and humanoid workers tasked with exploring the planet New Discovery and bringing objects from the planet aboard. These objects have an emotional effect on the crew, perhaps encouraging a mutiny that’s been brewing since the story’s start.
These emotions faciliate questions from both the humans and humanoids about what it means to be human. These visceral reactions also lead the crew and the reader to question the sentience of the objects. Does the humanoids’ attachments to the objects indicate a sense of recognition? Similarly, does the human crew’s attachment suggest their ability to empathize with the humanoids?
To this point, Ravn dedicates The Employees to sculptor Lea Guldditte Hestelund, who says she is “Interested in making forms that [are] not really human, but still living” (Ellison-Balaam, Lolli). The writer and artist collaborated for one of Hestelund’s exhibitions. Ravn began by writing profiles for the pieces that became long enough to constitute a book. This, paired with Ravn’s dissatisfaction with her office job and fascination with NASA astronauts led to the development of The Employees. Hestelund’s pieces are both recognizable and utterly otherworldly. They are bulbous and look soft, despite being made of stone. There is a familiarity there–a desire to reach and touch them, smell them, even taste them just to see if they are actually as permanent and unfeeling as marble.
The objects aboard the Six Thousand Ship are even more enticing. The engage the crew in feelings of love, lust, and sorrow–conjuring images of an Earth they left behind or have never experienced. These sensations segue into larger questions about humanity as both an identity and objective truth. One humanoid employee says, “I keep thinking about the one with the purple hide. Something about it makes react differently than the others do. Is this what my coworkers have told me about? A feeling, a sense of attachment?” (20). On the next page a presumably human employee comments, “It’s hard for me to understand the the objects in the rooms haven’t got feelings, even though you’ve told me this is the case” (21). Not only do these passages demonstrate the capacity for emotion in beings presumed to be objects, but they also foreshadow even loftier themes in the novella. In many ways, I’m not sure the story is interested in proving the humanoids’ humanity. Their ability to reflect through these testimonies (to even have testimonies!) makes them relatable to us. Even if they’re not born, they clearly have the same capacity for emotional intelligence that humans do.
If anything, the novel asks us to question humanity as a category–intermingling human and humanoid until they are totally imperceptible from one another. Early on, a human crewmember asks, “What would it mean for me to know I was not living? That I, who am human, were instead a chiseled, sculpted stone…no more intelligent, no more sentient than that?” (28). The paradoxical question opens the space to consider the nature of sentience. Being an object necessitates not knowing. In questioning one’s “objectness” one proves their sentience. It is a version of “I think therefore I am.” In offering these statements and expressing concern, humanity exists. Almost halfway through, another crewmember asks, “Am I human or humanoid? Have I been dreamt into being?” (59). The question of origin, the story suggests, is a lofty but ultimately unproductive one. How we constitute, define, and imagine humanity should not center on where someone is from or how they have existed. We can look to emotions, to awareness of the self and, even then, these parameters seem insufficient.
Maybe to be human is to be and to feel and to be felt in return.