Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles
After attending art school on Mars, Astrid is going home in search of motivation. Darling is looking for a place to hide as she runs away from a life that never felt right. They first see each other on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a faraway space station that is fighting for its very existence as the rate of change threatens to leave the locals behind.
A science fiction poetry novel in the Orkney vernacular, Deep Wheel Orcadia is a rare first. This fascinating exploration of poetry written in a minority language includes a parallel translation into witty and lively English, ensuring that the reader won’t miss any of the original’s subtleties.
With the lightness of touch, fluency, and musicality one might anticipate from one of the most gifted poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years, the rich and varied cast spins a compelling, lyric, and effortlessly readable tale about place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire. Harry Josephine Giles, who is from Orkney, is well recognized for being a talented poet and a spellbindingly inventive performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now ventures into adventurous new territory.
Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles
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Giles’ playful use of compound words gives the impression that we are reading the output of a well-designed and well-intended piece of Artificial Intelligence software attempting diligently to produce as accurate a translation as possible, which feels quite at home in the story’s setting. The translation brings you back to the original material in unexpected ways, but you’ll love it and come out of it feeling grateful.
Orcadian poetry sci-fi story. Orkney and mainland Scotland are logical analogs for tiny, remote Orcadia Station and enormous, crowded Mars. The author’s English translation is so masterfully done that it stands alone as poetry. It draws you into its storytelling because it is rich and warm. Green aircs for the big skeil of wheels, blue dubs for the tides, black lines for the stars, and airms and bolas collected around Central.
