The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

"Well, its structure is extraordinary. I’ve never read anything like it. It’s as though we’ve raided the filing cabinet of the human resources department on a spaceship where half the workers are humans, and the other half are… I suppose robots, or artificial intelligences contained in humanoid bodies. Each of these people, these spaceship dwellers, have been asked to report on their state of mind to the personnel department, and there’s this wonderful conjunction of fantasy with the most tedious aspects of office life and bureaucracy. It’s so funny. There’s something very witty about the way this book has been set up from the very beginning. The statements have been jumbled. So we get these reports out of numerical order, and we come to realise that’s probably because some terrible catastrophe has brought this story to its close. It’s formally inventive. You have to immediately lay aside all your preconceptions about this kind of fiction. This isn’t ordinary sci fi . There’s absolutely nothing about rocket launchers in it. It’s a book about love, and nostalgia, and home, and parenthood. It’s about the natural world and mortality. All these big themes are contained within these reports, which are not so much reports as confessions, the kind of outpourings that someone might offer to their therapist. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s a world in which the employees are being assessed according to their usefulness and efficiency. Are they good assets for the organisation that employs them? This is a deeply inhumane way of looking at human beings, or non-human beings. One of the very interesting things about it is that we are invited to respond emotionally to the non-human characters in pretty much the same way as we respond to the human ones. In other words, to open up our sense of who should be included in human sympathy. And in this world, which is run according to standards of efficiency and the requirements of the personnel department, there is also space for wonder and tenderness. Those delicate emotions are all the more cherished for the fact that there is no place for them in the utilitarian vision that was the spaceship. So I guess this is actually a deeply political book, about how workers are treated by their employers, and citizens by their governments. And it’s a reminder of what is lost when people are treated simply as a workforce. It’s also more than that… something very haunting and emotionally subtle. It’s a vision of the lovely delicacy of spirit of which humans are capable, and that political systems ignore at their cost. Great books, whatever their category or genre, are always unique. I think each of these books is so original, and has such an individual kind of creative energy, that it will be very difficult to choose between them. Not so much because of the difficulty of comparing unlike with unlike, but simply because they are all so very good. But I’m happy to say that there’s not a single book on this list that would not be a deserving winner."