Can I send an email from a generic author, like system@netsuite.com or something similar, or am I limited strictly to employees?

You could always make a generic employee, have the reports come from that employee

While it's a good idea, of course it doesn't work for us. We're always hovering close to our max number of active users, so they've heavily discouraged generic/unused accounts.

Employees don't need to have login access to be used as the author for

email.send()

, assuming that's your concern.

You might have to add vicarious email permission on the employee record though.

Looks like I can add a user without access, and it won't count against our limited # of licenses. Thanks all!

Yep, this is the approach I took, and I made the “from” email be an alias on my own email account, so I get replies/bounces.