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Loading... Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel (original 2021; edition 2021)by Harry Josephine Giles (Author)
Work InformationDeep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles (2021)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) tamaranth | Mar 26, 2024 |  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 - ) atreic | Sep 28, 2023 | 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. (  )1  nwhyte | Jul 13, 2023 |  ) gabbxoo | Dec 18, 2022 | no reviews | add a review
Awards
"Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind. Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science fiction verse novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire - all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space." No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.00Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction By TypeLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
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