The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members narrate their daily tasks and observations in a series of staff reports and memos. The homesick humans fondly reminisce about "a lost planet," and long for daylight and the smell of grass--oddly, some humanoids seem to echo this same nostalgia, as if defectively programmed.
When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light; each employee wonders whether they can carry on as before. Ravn's crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding: wracked by all kinds of desire and melancholy, The Employees probes into what makes us human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue, unsettling, and hilariously stinging critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.