The Employees
Employees on a spaceship submit witness reports about objects from an alien planet and begin to change. Ravn's experimental SF novella is formally rigorous and philosophically rich, a standout science fiction work of the period.
The Employees withholds basic context so aggressively that several readers say it takes dozens of pages before they can tell who is being interviewed or what the ship's purpose even is. Important details stay vague past the point of frustration: readers finish without a clear sense of what the retrieved objects physically are, and one dismisses the prose as “a bit slight in execution.” Because the numbered statements arrive out of sequence and mostly unmarked, it's genuinely hard to track which speaker is human and which is humanoid, undercutting a distinction the book otherwise treats as central. A sharply critical reader compares the whole experience to an art installation, writing that there is “not enough meat here” to justify the reputation, and another calls the book's evasiveness an “intentionally obtuse, indirect, opaque fashion” of telling a story that could have been told plainly.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
