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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

For more information on the history of the ‘Harvest Home’, you can read more here: https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/12/08/the-harvest-home/ 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. 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 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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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. 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?

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. 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’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 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.) 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. The Guardian called the book "a book of astonishments". [7] The Orkney News made favourable comparisons between elements of the story and life on Orkney, such as bad internet speeds, but felt the ending was unsatisfying and the cast list excessive. [8]

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. Literary ‘Poetry is always at the forefront of the political’: Safiya Sinclair on her extraordinary collection and the language of colonialism 05/10/2021 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? 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. 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.

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. Postcolonial and decolonial science fiction also writes through the trouble that languages like mine have been more often colonising than colonised: Orkney's significant role in the Hudson's Bay Company settler violence led to Orkney words being prominent in Bungi, the dialect of Red River Métis in Manitoba. Indigenous science fiction anthologies like Walking the Clouds (University of Arizona), edited by Grace Dillon, and Love After the End (Arsenal Pulp), edited by Joshua Whitehead, imagine Indigenous survivance beyond settler presents. ‘Minority language poetry and science fiction can be less of a surprise and more of an obvious necessity’ 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. 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.

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. Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Edinburgh. Their collection ‘Tonguit’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Games for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Saltire Prize for Best Collection. They have a strong spoken word scene presence – they were the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, and their theatre has also toured globally, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), Verb Festival (Aotearoa) and Teszt (Romania).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”. 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. 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.