HIS INTERFACE IS IMPRESSIVE
Lolli EditionsOctober 2020Selected by Barbara Epler
Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees is the story of the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship, an intergalactic starship and its crew and collections (of inter-stellar life-forms in part) told via what seem at first like innocuous brief testimonies of individual employees. The crew’s mostly staffed with humanoids, but with some humans as well, and things aren’t going very smoothly – these little reports/worries/complaints explore odd possibilities (one humanoid asks, “Was there an error in the update? If there was, I’d like to be rebooted”). The humans are homesick for their “lost planet”, pining for daylight and sights never to be seen again; the humanoids echo this nostalgia, as if defectively designed. Smells are a whole sick drama of their own in this book: there are epidermal breakouts and warts; there are child holograms for lonely working mothers; “bio-draperies” and “offstages” and weird sometimes living things around in the different rooms; and there is anger growing like one of the self-replicating life forms occupying the ship. “The ship’s changing” (as in, not good news, especially for the humans). As one humanoid employee states: “I don’t care what you say. You can’t update me.” The Employees brings to mind what might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby. — Barbara Epler
STATEMENT 031
I’ve never not been employed. I was made for work. I never had a childhood either, though I’ve tried to imagine one. My human co-worker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he’ll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There’s more to a person than the work they do, or A person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be? Where would your food come from? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your co-workers? Would you be left standing in a cupboard? I like him, this human co-worker of mine, his interface is impressive. I’m stronger than him, and have more endurance, but sometimes he’ll get an idea that means we can do our job in less than the designated time. He’s got an incredible knack for streamlining, from which I gladly learn. I’ve become a lot better myself at seeing how a workflow can be adjusted so that the task at hand can be completed more efficiently. This has surprised me rather a lot, because I’ve never known such improvements in my performance without an update being involved. Whenever we save time, I’m ready to move on to the next task straight away, but my co-worker always says, Now let’s sit for a bit. I’m not sure what he means by this, but I sit down with him all the same, sensing that I might offend him otherwise and jeopardise our excellent working relationship. Perhaps it’s an old custom from before my time? It’s not possible for me to continue our work on my own, so I hope you’ll be kind enough to overlook the matter, and anyway it’s only about 15 minutes a day at the most that we sit for a bit. He tells me about the bridge and the woods near his childhood home, about the stream that flowed under the bridge, how they used to swim there, and a lot of other things from the place he calls Earth. He’s shown me a stream that runs down in the valley. Obviously I can’t leave the ship, but he’s pointed it out to me from the panorama room. The stream glitters, and it runs like a silvery thought through the landscape. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was warm. A human hand. He said: “You’ve lots to learn, my boy.” An odd thing to say, seeing as how I was made a man from the start.
STATEMENT 044
The first smell that disappeared was the smell of outside, of the weather, you could say. Of fresh air. Now that I’ve acquired some small knowledge of it, I can say: the smell of gravity. The last smell that disappeared was the smell of vanilla. That, and the fragrance of my child when I would bend over the pram to pick him up. What I smell now are the rooms, and I dream that their walls are covered with great sheaves of hay and dried herbs, and that from these sheaves chains dangle with little pomanders of silver filigree, and the pomanders contain eyes, and the smell in the rooms comes from the sheaves and eyes together. And in the dreams, twigs and branches appear from out of the sheaves as if they were alive, and we try to escape them, but they come crawling out after us from under the door and cause us to faint. When I’m in the rooms, it feels as if the objects know about these dreams, and I become embarrassed.
STATEMENT 034
What would it mean for me to know that I was not living? That I, who am human, were instead a chiselled, sculpted stone, like the stones in this room, no more intelligent, no more sentient than that? And what would it mean if one could move only between two rooms, one containing the objects, the other the voices, to pass from room to room through a stream of light, in a fatty gush of light, endeavouring to love an object as a human being, a human being as an object? And what would it mean to know that these two rooms contained every space we ever occupied, every morning (November on Earth, five degrees Celsius, sun dazzling low in the morning sky, the child in the carrier seat on the back of the bicycle), every day (the ivy reddening in the frost on the outside of the office building) and every night (in the room below the stone pines, someone’s breath upon your eyelid), and that every place you ever knew existed there in these two recreation rooms, like a ship floating freely in darkness, encompassed by dust and crystals, without gravity, without earth, in the midst of eternity; without water and rivers, without offspring, without blood; without the creatures of the sea, without the salt of the oceans, and without the water-lily stretching up through the cloudy pond towards the sun? ◉
Ravn’s novel came about through a collaboration with the Danish artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund, who makes sculptures Ravn describes as “not really human, but still living”. Ravn wrote “little testimonies” about Hestelund’s works-in-progress, which eventually developed into The Employees.
Pre-order our 2021 Summer Reader, featuring book recommendations from Barbara Epler (New Directions), Jeremy Poynting (Peepal Tree Press), and Alexis Zavialoff & Maia Asshaq (Motto Books) here.