Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

Product Information

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.

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. 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? 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 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.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 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.) 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

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.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. 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.