a b Kelly, Stuart (15 October 2021). "Book review: Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles". The Scotsman . Retrieved 29 October 2022. It’s as if language itself becomes the book’s hero and the genre is all the richer for it,” he added. 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.)

The wheel has always been inhabited by the descendants of the Orcadian people, and their lifestyle echoes that of the Orkneys. Their economy is dependent of “fishing” for “lights”, a kind of superfuel that powers faster than light travel, which is found in the atmospheres of gas giants. They also harvest hulks, what appear to be alien spacecraft found trapped in the gravity well of the huge planet. The book is written in Orcadian verse, with an English translation provided in smaller text. [2] Translations for Orcadian words provide several possible English translations in a compound word. [3] The English translations were formatted to draw attention to the Orcadian, a technique also used by Gaelic poet Rody Gorman. [2] Awards [ edit ] 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. 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. 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. 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’ Chair of the judges Dr Andrew M Butler said that Deep Wheel Orcadia is “the sort of book that makes you rethink what science fiction can do and makes the reading experience feel strange in a new and thrilling way”. A symphony o yotuns, peedie suns and langships tae Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles hauds the starns in the loof o thier haun, terraformin new warlds in Scots. (A symphony of giants, miniature suns and longships to Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles holds the stars in the palm of their hand, terraforming new worlds in Scots.)

However, a theory is starting to emerge that “lights” are not what they seem to be, and may actually be a form of intelligent life, and this is beginning to be borne out by strange events happening around the station and also in the planet’s atmosphere. A young woman who's studying in the more urbane society of Mars struggles to navigate her identity and her belonging. Apart from all that it is a brilliant science fiction story, with good characterisation considering how little text there actually is in the end. Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.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. It follows Astrid who is returning home from art school on Mars, and Darling, who is fleeing a life that never fits. The pair meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.

The whole idea is kind of charming in a 19th century cultural nationalist intelligentsia sense, and the flow of the Orcadian verse was usually really very pleasing to the ear, but yeah, didn’t especially work for me. 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. 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. Matthew Fitt Deep Wheel Orcadia is a mysterious and moving novel in verse about finding home in the farthest reaches. Giles lifts us to new worlds, in space and in language, we could never have imagined. A singular and numinous work 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.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.

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. 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. 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 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. Sampson, Fiona (1 October 2021). "The best recent poetry – review roundup". the Guardian . Retrieved 30 October 2022.Harry Josephine Giles' DEEP WHEEL ORCADIA has a simple plot - it's a love story with familiar complications taking place on a space station that's purpose is to gather resources from the gas giant planet that it orbits. The groundbreaking originality and beauty of this work are derived from the subtle nuances of the Orcadian language, as well as Giles' gift for poetry and showcasing a minority language. Fiona Sampson in her Guardian review called Deep Wheel Orcadia “a book of astonishments” and said it “threads together questions of identity and belonging, alongside examinations of deep space and Orkney, in a single concisely yet scintillatingly told tale”. 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.