Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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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. 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. Literary ‘Poetry is always at the forefront of the political’: Safiya Sinclair on her extraordinary collection and the language of colonialism 05/10/2021 The Orkney language is, linguistically, a dialect of Scots, though we rarely call it that at home, preferring just "the wey we spaek". Scots itself, formally one of Scotland's national languages, is a sister language to English, grown from the same roots into a thrawn, disputed and often-pruned shrub. The Orkney variant is strongly influenced by Old Norse, and grew out of an older language, Norn, itself formed through the Viking colonisation of the islands that preceded Scottish influence. If that's confusing, so is all language: one of the appealing things to me about writing Orcadian is that it requires thorny exposition to trouble the history of things like "nation" and "language". 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.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.

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. 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'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’ 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. Sampson, Fiona (1 October 2021). "The best recent poetry – review roundup". the Guardian . Retrieved 30 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. 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. 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. 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