Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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I'm glad it exists (I'm glad when anyone imagines themselves happy in the far future) but it's too contrived for me. In particular most of the noun translations / calques are overdone kennings ("wantneed" for "waant", "fullbursting" for "pangit" and "codeprogramscripture"). Obviously scifi is full of neologism and funny phonemes, and kenning is a natural way for a logicish intelligence to convey connotation and polysemy. But even very successful scifi prose often feels contrived, even if the novelty skeuomorphism is worth the loss in taste. And this isn't very successful. 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. The story, such as it is, involves two young girls, Astrid and Darling, arriving on the Deep Wheel Orcadia, a space station orbiting a gas giant in a far distant star system. It is humanity’s furthest station from Earth and the closest to the galactic centre. It’s as if language itself becomes the book’s hero and the genre is all the richer for it,” he added.

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? 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 ] I particularly loved the translation style, which takes so much care to express the range each Orcadian word holds, preserving as much nuance as possible. To 'bide' becomes to 'waitstaylive', for instance, so you can really revel in the depth and fun of the language, no matter which way you read this. To call this something of an unusual book would be an understatement. Giles is a poet who works primarily in the Orcadian dialect, the local language of the Orkney Islands. It’s kind of a mixture of English, Scots dialect words and old Norse. Despite being subtitled “a novel” this book is written in verse and in this dialect.Since I’m of a certain age and Scottish my first read of this was in the way it was originally set out, as an epic poem in Orcadian, and? For the most part I could understand what was written and in this form it was really satisfying, only rarely having to pop down to see the english translationinterpretationmeaning of the words used. Surprisingly, the Orkney is not that difficult to read. I read this twice, reading both the English and Orkney, with a good deal of the Orkney aloud. I am more engaged with the politics of the translation than the actual story itself, though the story is fine. I just think it should go on more. It seems too short and unfinished to be called a novel, as the cover of my copy does. It is also described as verse, and may be verse in the Orkney, but does not seem to be in verse in the English.

Smith, Reiss (28 April 2022). "Author on 'horrible' reality of trans folk having to fund each other's healthcare". PinkNews . Retrieved 29 October 2022. The story itself is – well, I was left entirely confused about the whole thing with the energy ghosts and all that, but everything else was fine, but kind of shallowly dealt with? The station was vividly drawn, the cast all seemed very real, but there just wasn’t the word count to actually deal with any of the stuff the book wanted to except by just touching on them and gesturing at wider tropes. 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). But everything else? Just two many POVs and irons in the fire, not enough space for any of them to really breathe. Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science fiction verse novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire—all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Poet Harry Josephine Giles’s verse novel, Deep Wheel Orcadia, has won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction book of the year.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.

Gorgeous. In a relatively short space, Giles evokes a real sense of a community, with all its joy and difficulties. A helpful cast listing at the beginning ensures you always remember who's who, but each character feels distinct. They feel authentic and full, all while occupying a fantastic sci-fi space. Deep Wheel Orcadia is imaginative and playful with identity and technology, asks hard questions about home and art, explores family and friendship - without ever feeling rushed or stiff.

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read, Deep Wheel Orcadia is a science fiction poem written in the Orkney dialect. Because this is primarily a spoken language, Giles must render the speech into recognizable form while preserving the character of the spoken word—no mean feat. Orkney is derived from Scots, but also contains the influence of the Norse, making it unique and musical. The award was originally established by a grant from Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain, and is currently administered by the Serendip Foundation, a voluntary organisation created to oversee the ongoing delivery and development of the award. 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’ 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.