Where to find it: The Employees, translated from its original Danish, can be found on Amazon, Thriftbooks, Bookshop, wherever you get your books, etc. The book was written in response to a 2018 art installation by Lea Guldditte Hestelund, which you can find photos of here.
What is it, in summary?: Space opera with horror elements, told through a series of surreal HR reports. In the not-too-distant future, a crew of humans and bioengineered “humanoids” work together aboard the Six Thousand Ship, a corporate space freighter. When they retrieve a collection of eldritch living-sculpture-like objects from the planet New Discovery, life on the ship starts to unravel into a bizarre fever dream, and the future of the company — and the relationships between the crew — become a powder keg waiting to explode.
What do you love about it?: Its gorgeous, lyrical prose, for one — there are so many lines in this weird little book that just hit me like a freight train. Its experimental format: the HR statements that make up the book’s structure are anonymous, scattered fragments of a larger whole, and piecing together individual character arcs and plotlines from them is a fun puzzle-box with a really juicy payoff. Its world feels so richly layered and lived-in despite the short space the story has to develop it, and there’s a lot of room in the sandbox for fanwork to play around in.
What sort of things are you likely to request for it?: Worldbuilding: what are the objects, why was the Six Thousand Ship sent to collect them, and what the hell is going on back on Earth? I’d also love something about the complicated dynamics of human-humanoid relations, whether on or off the ship (particularly expanding on the various human-humanoid friendships/relationships throughout the book, and on a certain group of characters that are humanoids forced to pretend to be human). And the book’s wonderfully poignant ending leaves a lot of things up in the air; I’d love to see what comes next. Something that pastiches the book’s style, or that uses some other kind of experimental formatting, would be really cool (although I’d be equally excited to receive a normal fic!) I’m opting into the Interactive Fiction challenge and Crueltide as well.
The Employees - Olga Ravn
Media: Novella
Approx length: 30k words
Where to find it: The Employees, translated from its original Danish, can be found on Amazon, Thriftbooks, Bookshop, wherever you get your books, etc. The book was written in response to a 2018 art installation by Lea Guldditte Hestelund, which you can find photos of here.
What is it, in summary?: Space opera with horror elements, told through a series of surreal HR reports. In the not-too-distant future, a crew of humans and bioengineered “humanoids” work together aboard the Six Thousand Ship, a corporate space freighter. When they retrieve a collection of eldritch living-sculpture-like objects from the planet New Discovery, life on the ship starts to unravel into a bizarre fever dream, and the future of the company — and the relationships between the crew — become a powder keg waiting to explode.
What do you love about it?: Its gorgeous, lyrical prose, for one — there are so many lines in this weird little book that just hit me like a freight train. Its experimental format: the HR statements that make up the book’s structure are anonymous, scattered fragments of a larger whole, and piecing together individual character arcs and plotlines from them is a fun puzzle-box with a really juicy payoff. Its world feels so richly layered and lived-in despite the short space the story has to develop it, and there’s a lot of room in the sandbox for fanwork to play around in.
What sort of things are you likely to request for it?: Worldbuilding: what are the objects, why was the Six Thousand Ship sent to collect them, and what the hell is going on back on Earth? I’d also love something about the complicated dynamics of human-humanoid relations, whether on or off the ship (particularly expanding on the various human-humanoid friendships/relationships throughout the book, and on a certain group of characters that are humanoids forced to pretend to be human). And the book’s wonderfully poignant ending leaves a lot of things up in the air; I’d love to see what comes next. Something that pastiches the book’s style, or that uses some other kind of experimental formatting, would be really cool (although I’d be equally excited to receive a normal fic!) I’m opting into the Interactive Fiction challenge and Crueltide as well.
Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence): Body horror (particularly trypophobia).