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Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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In my second attempt I managed to muddle through, but it wasn’t easy since so many of the characters are one-note. Like, the sense of entropy and the worry of your home fading away and all the young people leaving to go seek a future their home can’t give them, and people desperately trying to find some way to adapt or giving up entirely – that was pretty keenly felt (one rather gets the sense that Orcadia and the Orkney Isles share more than just a language). Giles has created a convincing society living among the stars but still very much clinging to its cultural heritage, and in the end the book is more about what tradition means in an age of technology than anything else. The Deep Wheel is an isolated space station, distant from the centres of human habitation and with a fragile economy based on harvesting a fuel named Light.

As is almost always the case where a work has flat characters, the relationships between them were likewise uninteresting. 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 am interested in the thought or act of relegating the English translation to the bottom of the page in a smaller font, deemphasizing it, the language of empire, though clearly meant for readers of English since it's there. The strikingly unusual sci-fisetting is mirrored in the unique form of this verse novel, which is written in the dialect of the Orkney islands, with a parallel English translation.Deep Wheel Orcadia’ is a set of linked poems, which read more like a prose, each telling a story of a particular character from the book. I admire the ambition and use of language and culture but overall didn’t feel the story quite worked as well as it should have.

Thus, "a piece tae bide" isn't translated as "a place to live," but rather as "a placedistancepartwhile to waitstaylive. Maaaaybe the Odyssey, but even with the Iliad you'd be pushing it, and as for something more modern like Don Juan.My sole criticism would be that the story ends quite abruptly and I would have liked it to carry on further. Oddly, the Scots is way less sentimental than the English translation, probably those kennings' fault.

the concept itself — a space odyssey written in verse, in orkney dialect first and then translated into english and the linguistics are genius, as is the delicately woven web of relationships, the ties of love, friendship, and family connecting the unique cast of characters stranded on the titular space station, i could hardly get enough of it.I am more engaged with the politics of the translation than the actual story itself, though the story is fine.

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