The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn
Published 2018 · 128 pages · 22,429 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Science Fiction, Modernist & Experimental Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century to read?
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Ravn mixes plain workplace and corporate phrasing with precise sensory description of smells, fabrics and stones. Nothing is archaic or invented, so it reads closer to Ishiguro's formal clarity than to anything dense.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Sentences are short and conversational, with a few long accumulating lists, as in the statement about the two rooms containing every space ever occupied. The grammar stays direct throughout.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Questions about what counts as living or human run through concrete objects, smells and dreams. The ideas ride on specific images of eggs, hides and bio-draperies, but they keep returning to consciousness and personhood.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Each short statement drops new details about the ship, the objects or the crew without much exposition. The book is brief, so the reader tracks many fragments but never a heavy load.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- The interviewers never speak, so you reconstruct their questions and the ship's conflict from the answers. The committee's true nature emerges only at the end, which makes readers rebuild everything.
- Symbolic density: 76 out of 100
- The objects, eggs, smells, hides, bio-draperies and child holograms accumulate meaning across statements. Like Flights, the images recur and gather weight rather than resolve into a single allegory.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- Corporate language framing grief, love and death produces constant irony, and the committee's final report undercuts its claims of neutrality. Yet many speakers are earnest, which keeps the irony from being total.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The ship is terminated and the committee recommends another passage, but what the objects are and whether anyone is truly alive stays open. The puzzle of the objects is never solved.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- Statements appear out of order, some are redacted or cut off, and voices overlap with no named speakers. The closing report recasts the whole record, so the form carries much of the meaning.
How The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century is regarded
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century holds a literary regard score of 54 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Where the story of The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century takes place
- Spaceship, 22nd century, the main setting
- The Six Thousand Ship, an interstellar future, the main setting