Given the limited resources of a spaceship every human must fulfil an essential purpose. This short novel is composed of over a hundred brief statements given by the ship's crew in relation to some evocative and mysterious objects gathered from a distant planet as well as their perspective about a growing crisis aboard the ship. Nevertheless, I found a lot of relevancy in how the human and (robotic) humanoid employees of the Six-Thousand Ship discuss their approach to labour in relation to their essential purpose for being. Of course, Olga Ravn couldn't have anticipated this reading of her novel because the book was first published in Danish in 2018. This book's relatively new publisher Lolli Editions has also been intimately concerned with the effects of the pandemic as one of their first publications was the anthology “Tools for Extinction” which gathered writers' responses to the pandemic from around the world. I'm hesitant to filter everything I've been reading lately through the events of the past year, but how we read is often reflective of our states of mind and so I'll naturally have a slanted experience of what I'm reading in response to how the pandemic has consumed my recent life and effected the entire world. “The Employees” by Olga Ravn is a very thoughtful and artfully-written science fiction novel that speaks a lot about this subject through a future-set fantastical point of view.
So it feels especially poignant now to contemplate the degree to which our work defines us and expresses who we are as individuals. The recent pandemic has caused many people to be furloughed or forced them to change their careers.
0 kommentar(er)
