Harry Josephine Giles

This has been hailed as the best orcadian language LGBT+ science fiction book written in poetry, and, well, it is hard to argue with that!

Joking about how unusual it is aside, it is also a really good read. It is poetic and carefully drawn, with themes of staying and returning, failing industry, and life in small communities. It can be confusing - it is poems full of sense and feeling, not a straightforward narrative - but it rewards the effort you put in. Some scenes just stick with you - the dance, the Lights, Astrid's frustration at her art, boats and storms. It is 100% Orkney and 100% Deep Space Station all at the same time.

My biggest complaint would be that it feels like it just suddenly ends. There was so much more I wanted to know - especially Darling's backstory, and whether she would ever reunite or completely free herself from her family, but also what would happen next as the strange alien light made itself known but instead the book just ends in the middle of everything - the wrecks unfolding, the storm raging, Astrid deciding to flee away from Orcadia again, and maybe that is the point, but I wanted more!… (more)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/deep-wheel-orcadia-by-harry-josephine-giles/

Rather unusually, it has the form of an epic poem in Orcadian, the language of the Orkney Islands, with English translation running along the lower half of each page. (Also unusually, it is the first part of the author’s PhD thesis.) It’s a love story between a local and a visitor in a spaceport where there are humans and aliens and general things of wonder. 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.

And anyway the point is to shake us out of Anglophone complacency and to consider the value of less-spoken languages, and their potential for added nuance and expression, and giving us readers a broader experience of what the world can contain. It very much ticks the Philip K. Dick box, that good sf shouldn’t just be “What if…?” but “My God! What if…?” – in a very different way. I thought ti was fantastic from that point of view.… (more)