The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

Where are you, in this little novel? From its subtitle, you can tell you are in the next century, and from the description on the back (and, slowly, from the reports within) you learn you are in a spaceship on a planet that isn't Earth. The book is built of short, oblique statements made by the ship's crew—some human, some humanoid—and from them you can build the bones of a story about the increasingly disastrous events that unfold there, but what is far more striking is the strange tenderness they evoke, on both sides of the human/nonhuman divide. When I came to the last statement I turned back to the beginning and read them again, in part out of the (pleasurable) mystery their incompleteness evokes, in part to experience again the odd and delicate emotions they stir up.