Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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The Orkney dialect is entrancing, giving Orcadia station an immediately distinct sense of time and place, while ensuring that its mirroring of modern day Orkney is never far away. It’s actually quite short, and the plot as such is not original, but the characters and setting are very well drawn, in two languages. I like that idea and it was interesting to read the English that way, at times slowing down and others speeding up, depending upon the particular words and if they were making another appearance, repeated.

It's fascinating to see how Giles has adjusted the form to match the tone of the situation or characters in any given poem, while maintaining a cohesive setting throughout. The English translations were formatted to draw attention to the Orcadian, a technique also used by Gaelic poet Rody Gorman.Giles doesn’t even clear the much lower bar of making the story’s characters memorable enough to keep straight. Little languages, especially those thought of as rural and peripheral, are often cast as dwindling languages of the past.

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. She meets a newcomer from Mars, Darling, who is described as ‘taall’ and ‘pael’ with ‘reid hair’ (tall and pale with red hair).If you have news, views, writing, music, or artwork that you think people need to know about, get in touch using the contact form on this site, or Facebook or Twitter.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is unlike anything I've read before, a sci-fi novel in verse about home, belonging, and place written in the Orkney dialect with an English translation. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, who won the first award in 1987 for The Handmaid’s Tale, and China Miéville. Deep Wheel Orcadia is imaginative and playful with identity and technology, asks hard questions about home and art, explores family and friendship - without ever feeling rushed or stiff. But the actual point of the book is that it’s written in the Orcadian dialect (that is the dialect of the Orkney Isles) – each page is half filled with the text in Orcadian (and I’m fairly sure in verse), and then repeated in English in the bottom half. i am not quite sure where the novel exactly falls short, whether it's just the length leaving too little time to flesh things out or a lack of depth, but i couldn't help but feel there was something missing and find the end abrupt and unsatisfying without a sense of true closure or the explanations i was hoping for.There's probably a lot of different ways to read the book with its dual text, and though I settled into reading each page first in the Orkney and then English, I could imagine trying out different ways in the future. 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? Compared to works like The Hair-Carpet Weavers by Eschbach or Alice B Sheldon’s Ten Thousand Light Years From Home or Arkday and Boris Strugatsky’s stories, this feels intellectually and emotionally thin. But it didn’t remain a writing exercise, instead it was published as a science fiction book for popular consumption despite its lack of interesting characters or relationships, extreme brevity, and failure to wrap up in any satisfying way.