Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical, literary first; an adventurous story of an art student on a distant space station written in both English and the Orkney-language translation, side by side. Harry Josephine Giles, award-winning writer and performer, grew up in the Orkney Islands and is uniquely placed to pull off such an original piece of genre fiction. The story is slight, although it does build to an exciting conclusion. Mostly, though, the book is a glimpse into this imagined way of life, and with the lyrical verse format of the writing the closest analogy I can make is that it is like an interstellar Under Milk Wood. Like all poems - they’re best heard *and* read, not one or the other. Get the book, but also get the audiobook. Use them together.

a b Shaffi, Sarah (26 October 2022). "Arthur C Clarke award goes to 'thrilling' verse novel by Harry Josephine Giles". the Guardian . Retrieved 28 October 2022. It might seem at a glance that this novel is a mishmash of counterintuitive genre, form, and dialect. And I think that's the point. It's not novel for novelty's sake. At its heart, it wrestles with the contradictions of the modern day Orkney Isles and their persistent state of liminality: between history and modernity; rejuvenation and decay; innovation and tradition. It's a deeply beautiful novel that paints an aching picture of life on the fringes. Thankfully Giles also provides a plain English translation alongside the Orcadian text so that you don’t have to sit with an Orcadian dictionary at hand. This makes the experience of reading it somewhat akin to watching a foreign language movie with subtitles. In this translation they also provide a concatenated version of every possible option when a word doesn’t translate exactly into English. The poems were actually written in the Orkney dialect of Scottish. It’s not something you’ll be able to read, and, no, watching all six seasons of Outlander will not have prepared you in any way to read these poems. (Well. I did ken what a bairn was.) Reading Deep Wheel Orcadia is a rich experience of interpretation and translation on multiple connected levels. The quote above gives you 'kist' and 'sleeping-chestcoffinbreast' for the place where a character is sleeping in her room on the space station. These options leave an area for the reader's imagination to fill, while making them more aware of this process of interpretation and visualisation from context. They delineate an area for interpretation in a way that a single word would not. I've never read a book that unveiled and examined the process of sci-fi linguistic world-building in this way before and found it riveting.So the story itself is of a space station in the middle of nowhere, its economy based on gathering some strange cosmic fuel source from a local gas giant, and about to collapse as a revolutionary advance in starship technology decimates demand for that resource. At the same time, there’s a resident xenologist studying the strange alien ships pulled up from the gas giant, and strange spectral energy ghosts have begun to haunt the station. Deep Wheel Orcadia is a science-fiction novel by Harry Josephine Giles. It is a verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect of the Scots language in parallel with an English translation. The book won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke award. It was published by Picador Poetry in 2021. [1] Plot [ edit ] This newly minted Arthur C. Clark award winner has novelty, a surfeit of it in my opinion, but neglects the fundamentals. If you just care about reading something different then Deep Wheel Orcadia fits the bill, but if you value world building, well-written characters, a plot, or any form of resolution, then you should probably give this one a pass. For more information on the history of the ‘Harvest Home’, you can read more here: https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/12/08/the-harvest-home/

It's also just the language I grew up with, in the island of Westray (in Orkney the preposition is always "in" and never "on"), which my English family moved to when I was two years old, giving me a half-in half-out experience of both tongues that I'll never be clear of and have learned to embrace. I write in it because I need it to understand where I'm from and how I feel about it, but getting there was a long process of experimenting in many forms of English and Scots. ‘Writing science fiction in my small tongue is a way of willing that language into the future, and imagining worlds in which minority languages can thrive’ As is almost always the case where a work has flat characters, the relationships between them were likewise uninteresting. Even if someone looked me right in the eye and told me that they were truly invested in the relationship between Margit and Gunnie I wouldn’t believe them. Astrid the artist is the main character of the story, but her relationship with her parents is boilerplate, I didn’t care about her struggles to come to terms with the truth that you can’t go home again, nor did I care about her romance with newcomer Darling. We’re told about that romance but aren’t made to feel it, and if a romance completely fails to make you feel anything then what’s its point?Deep Wheel Orcadia’ is a first book written in Orkney dialect (or Orcadian) in over fifty years. However, please do not feel discouraged by this notion, as there is a translation provided. As a person living in Orkney (but not coming from Orkney), I was grateful for the translation, but as I got into the swing of reading the original, I felt I needed the translation less and less. In 2022, Deep Wheel Orcadia won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, where it was praised for its writing and its use of language. [6] Reception [ edit ] Apart from all that it is a brilliant science fiction story, with good characterisation considering how little text there actually is in the end. The poems won the Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction writing because they help show what’s possible in the genre. Overall, this is a beautifully written book. I loved the poetic nature of its verses. Saying that, I felt there were far too many characters to form a connection with any of them – maybe that was the purpose, but for me, when I am reading a story, I like to feel some sort of emotional inkling. Also, the book doesn’t really have a proper ending. Again, that also could have been done purposely, but I felt as if the characters were just abandoned somewhere in space, circling the orbit.

Through them all you get a snapshot of the daily struggles and doubts, as people make everyday decisions that keep their community alive, while some wonder where the community will be in the years ahead. Whether their community will die or change, and whether there's a different between the two.

How Treasure Island was born out of Robert Louis Stevenson trying to amuse his stepson on a wet summer holiday in Braemar So someone on here recommended I gives this a try, and having read it I’m flattered that they thought I was sufficiently cultured to get that much out of it. Or better to say that I appreciated it as, like, a concept or an art object more than I enjoyed it as a story or as a work of literature? To give you a taste of what all this is like, here is my favorite passage from the book, a passage filled with a quiet, understated wisdom. Astrid, who has been away from home for some time at art school and just returned—for good or only briefly?—and has taken up with Darling, a refugee from wealthy parents, is speaking with her father: They dinno spaek about Darling ava, an they dinno spaek aboot art, an thay dinno spaek aboot whither Astrid's bidan haem or no. But thay deu.which tranlates to: They don't speak about Darling at all, and they don't speak about art, and they don't speak about Astrid waitstayliving home or not. But they do. I really appreciated this, as it invites the reader to think about the choices involved in translation. It emphasised to me that the Orcadian word was often the most vivid and effective, whether familiar from English or not. 'Swaalls and birls' are beautiful and assonant; I prefer them to any of the English options. I think I absorbed the book as a melange of Orkney dialect and English. This would have been an appealing experience in any genre, but I found it particularly appropriate for sci-fi.