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language: Scots
country: UK
year: 2021
form: poetry, novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 12.5.23
Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia is a sci-fi verse novel in Orcadian Scots, accompanied by prose English intertonguings à la Rody Gorman, although Giles’s are less thorough than Gorman’s generally are (more on this below). I mostly read the Scots and only looked down at the English for a word or two here and there; as I got into the flow of the novel the Scots got easier to read, which was a nice surprise. I think reading it aloud helped, although I’m sure my accent is atrocious.
the novel follows a cast of characters on the space station Orcadia, “the innermosst [glossed as: closest to the galactic centre] Nordren staetion”, where people make a living gathering Light, a mysterious substance — or possibly entity — that’s used as starship fuel, and which comes from the atmosphere of the gas giant Orcadia orbits and which tends to concentrate around mysterious and possibly out-of-time derelict ships that appear and disappear in the atmosphere. it is, really, Orkney in space: a geographically (or astrographically) peripheral “island” where people make a mostly subsistence living from fuel extraction and refining that gets harder and harder every year as capitalism makes more and more inroads and leverages new technological developments to put them out of a job, where the people speak a stigmatized language in continuum with the dominant language of education and “central” culture.
the “main” characters are Astrid, a local woman recently returned from art school on Mars, trying to reintegrate herself into her home community but feeling increasingly alienated from it even as she is protective, or defensive, of its people, language, and way of life; and Darling, a woman originally from Mars who ran away from her wealthy family to escape the pressures of inheritance and her parents’ dreams that she’d inherit the corporation. there’s also, I think, a certain vague suggestion that she may be trans. Astrid and Darling meet by chance and immediately hit it off, but struggle with their radically different class and cultural backgrounds — but also with the fact that Astrid increasingly feels trapped on Orcadia while Darling is, for perhaps the first time, experiencing something like freedom.
additional characters include Astrid’s parents, Inga (captain of a Light-gathering ship) and Øyvind (attempting to develop a new food-synthesizing process); Eynar, a local bartender; and Noor, a visiting xenoarchaeologist who becomes involved with Eynar but, more importantly, is slowly developing a theory about the derelicts and the origins and nature of the Light.
it’s a moody novel, at times beautiful, at times heartbreaking, at times hopeful, at times hopeless — not in that the characters are giving up, but in that they’re trapped and can’t see their way to any other form of life than the one they currently inhabit. the end of the novel is decidedly ambiguous, but it seems to me that some kind of hope emerges — at the very least, by the end of the novel change is coming, and not from the impersonal forces of capitalism.
the poetry itself is lovely, although I think it might have been slightly better served by being a little more structured. I also wish the intertonguings had been wilder. for contrast, here’s Rody Gorman’s intertonguing of his poem “Gathan” (from Beartan Briste):
deathseektravelling back in the tiredminchoceanbay,
i saw like a flashflame eitherbothbetween two
moonphaseknowledgelighthouses shootburning on the
woofcreamsurfacetop and sheafspokesunbeamdarts
gaudyglittering like a shadow in the
halfbottlespecttreoldcodboy’s oilskinblouse
and here’s one of Giles’s paragraphs:
Noor steers her skiff through the emptyabandoned hulks. It has been a longtiring day, the drudgemuddletrudge of logging every measuremarklot of the wreck, Inga’s salvagewrecktreasure.
it seems like mainly she’s chosen just to intertongue words she thinks won’t be clear to a speaker of English or southern Scots dialects, rather than doing almost every non-function word the way Gorman does (inexplicably he leaves faileas just as “shadow” instead of like…”shadowshadespectre”). (I also note that the word interongued as “salvagewrecktreasure” is actually godssend, which is an interesting kind of gikun thing). I think something erring more on the “every single word” side might have been better, especially because it would avoid things like the following paragraph, or at least make them less common:
Since she came to space she’s found her body thickening – Orcadia’s gravitational spin a drag on her moon-grown bones – and her mind thinning.
regardless, I loved this so much that I’m considering teaching it next year, so. check it out.
moods: emotional, grimy, inspiring, sad