Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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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 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. 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 book is split into three parts, and in the first one, there is a clear portrayal of a struggling community: people working to make ends meet and food being scarce, while on the other hand, some searching for their identity and their place in the world. 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.

A space odyssey science fiction novel written in the Orcadian dialect in the form of an epic poem, if this isn’t enough to sell it to you read on. The poems won the Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction writing because they help show what’s possible in the genre. How Treasure Island was born out of Robert Louis Stevenson trying to amuse his stepson on a wet summer holiday in BraemarSmith, Reiss (28 April 2022). "Author on 'horrible' reality of trans folk having to fund each other's healthcare". PinkNews . Retrieved 29 October 2022.

Along the way we also meet Astrid’s father Oyvind, Eynar the local bar owner, Noor the scientist, Olaf the ship’s captain, and a host of other entertaining and often slightly bizarre characters. 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. 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.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. Folk keep asking me while I chose to write an Orkney language science fiction verse novel, and I can hardly blame them: such a pile-up of noun adjuncts demands the question. But the truth is that I didn't choose to write Deep Wheel Orcadia in the way I did: the writing started happening before I thought properly about why. a b c Richardson, Michael Lee (11 October 2021). "Harry Josephine Giles on Orkney Sci-Fi Deep Wheel Orcadia". The Skinny . Retrieved 28 October 2022. 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. An undoubtedly beautifully written book, and a fascinating reading experience. It does however leave some things to be desired, particularly where plot and to a lesser extent worldbuilding are concerned. How important these elements actually are to the overall experience of reading the book may vary from reader to reader; for myself I was definitely left wanting.

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. 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’ Merritt, Mike (10 January 2022). "Author Harry Josephine Giles pulls novel from Highland Book Prize in protest against all-white shortlists". The Times . Retrieved 27 October 2022.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. 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? 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. 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.

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. My sole criticism would be that the story ends quite abruptly and I would have liked it to carry on further. If you have an interest in sci-fi, languages in general, Scottish languages in particular, or are just looking for new and rewarding reading experiences, I definitely recommend Deep Wheel Orcadia. Both structure and content are compelling and unique. It is a rare and heady pleasure to read. One reason I distrust the kennings is that they only go one way. A single Orcadian word leads to a compound English term, and never the reverse. This feels like clumsy bragging about one's ane leid. Also, if an Orkney word doesn’t have a single English meaning, they’re gonna list all 3-4 meanings of the word smooshed together. You learn to love it. The question I'd like to ask is "Why do you write in English?" Inwith and outwith the grand and sprawling beast of that international language are many other tongues and possibilities. The commonplace monolingualism of these islands is false and forced: everyone carries multiple ways of speaking within them. Unearthing languages in the present and growing them into the future is a demand and a joy.I then read the story in the english translationinterpretationsense and loved the way some Orcadian words were set down in this version and did think that this was the only way it could really be done. The winner was announced at an award ceremony hosted by the Science Museum, London. The prize was presented by Dr Glyn Morgan, lead exhibition curator for the museum’s current exhibition Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination. Finally I scanned the Orcadian several times to get the rhythm of the words, then read it aloud and honestly this felt the beast way of interacting with the text. you got the strength of certain passages and lines, some words got greater strength from being spoken aloud. It really feels like a story that should be shared at night with friends. In my experience reading sci-fi (and to an extent other fantastical fiction) always involves interpreting new words or new uses of familiar words for concepts, technologies, and activities. This sometimes becomes an act of translation and certainly expands the reader's understanding of words' meanings and recombinations. Some sci-fi writers minimise reader effort of this sort with detailed explanations; Andy Weir springs to mind. Others create a whole new vocabulary and let the reader work out what they can from context cues, e.g. Hannu Rajaniemi. Most fall somewhere between the two extremes. Personally I love this element of sci-fi reading, which Jo Walton wrote memorably about in What Makes This Book So Great.