Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

"The 2022 Arthur C Clarke Award was won by Harry Josephine Giles for their remarkable, boundary-pushing novel-in-verse Deep Wheel Orcadia , set on a space station and told in the Orcadian dialect (alongside a creative English translation). I spoke to the chair of the judges, Andrew M. Butler earlier this year, who noted that “it’s the sort of book the prize exists to draw attention to for die-hard sci fi readers, and to make non-sci fi readers question their assumptions about the genre.” Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace (which was also shortlisted for the Clarke Award) won the Hugo Award for best novel this year; its the second novel in her Teixcalaan sequence—you might want to start with A Memory Called Empire , which started the series and was also highly acclaimed. P Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn won the 2022 Nebula Award for best novel, along with a bunch of other awards including the Locus Award for best first novel—it’s a fun, magical whodunnit set in an alternate, steampunk Cairo, and it has found a passionate fanbase. At the World Fantasy Awards, the best novel winner was The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, an epic high fantasy described by Shelley Parker-Chan as a “feminist masterpiece.” Stephen Graham Jones won the Bram Stoker Award for My Heart is a Chainsaw (described by the publishers as “ Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th “, which sounds fun); the Mystery Writers of America awarded the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Award to Five Decembers by James Kestrel, a 1940s noir with a brilliantly pulpy cover; and the International Thriller Writers garlanded S.A. Cosby for the second year running for Razorblade Tears , described to me by Tosca Lee earlier this year as “a moody Southern thriller with fast-paced action, the story of two men—one black, one white, both ex-cons—who team together to solve the murder of their sons, who were married to one another. It’s a gritty tale that looks into questions of race, poverty, and other bias through the lens of both violence and compassion.” In the UK, Ray Celestin won the 2022 Golden Dagger for his novel Sunset Swing . Scottish author James Robertson won the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for his latest novel, News of the Dead . I spoke to judge Elizabeth Laird earlier this year, who said: “Behind the beguiling, interlinked narrative of three characters from different periods of history—an Iron Age hermit, a nineteenth-century literary conman, and a child thrown out into the world from war-torn Europe—is a profound appreciation of a landscape, the rocks, the rain, the streams, trees and mosses of the remote Scottish glen where these three lives are lived.” And in Australia and New Zealand, the $50,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize went to Thomas Keneally’s Corporal Hitler’s Pistol , described by The Guardian as “a compelling blend of historical crime thriller and intricate portrait of an Australian rural community.” The UK’s Romantic Novelists Association highlights the best books in nearly a dozen romance sub-categories; we’ve heard great things about A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, which topped the fantasy romance category. The Romance Writers of America did not run their Vivian Awards this year. Part of our best books of 2022 series. December 13, 2022. Updated: February 7, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"Novels-in-two-verses, you might argue. One in Orcadian, one in English. Orcadian is a dialect of Scots—as opposed to Gaelic—and there’s a history of Scots feeding into science fiction and horror, especially Gothic horror. In 1919, someone came up with the idea of the Caledonian antisyzygy —the Scots think in one language, but feel in another, say. There’s a sort of divided consciousness at the centre of Scottish books , poetry and art—and we can trace this division in authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Iain M. Banks and many others. The action of Deep Wheel Orcadia is mostly set on or close to an isolated space station, at a crisis point in the solar system, and focuses on the working and private lives of the characters on board. You could decide to read the Orcadian version and then the English, or vice versa, or just one—but you’d miss so much if you only read half. I think you can pick up the Orcadian, as you might the Riddleyspeak in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker . Mind you, the English isn’t straightforward. Look at this on the first page: She watched the Deep Wheel approach, grey-green, its Central Station still turntwistwhirlspinning againstaboutbefore the yellow gas giant. That first coinage is a translation, well, four translations, of ‘tirlan,’ which I assume could be translated as any of them. Translators usually just pick one equivalent, which can shift the meaning of the original. As the text is their own translation, Giles could adjudicate between them, but allows all four. And sometimes what you might see as ‘Received Pronunciation’ dialogue breaks into the Orcadian. There’s a long tradition of science fiction looking to the past or to other cultures as inspiration. I was at a maritime museum in Bergen, Norway, a couple of years ago and a map there located Orkney as almost being central to the Viking interests—the North Sea as a sort of internal sea as the Mediterranean was for the Romans. You can read the Norse sagas and some of the Old English poetry of the pre-eleventh century and there’s a science fictional, certainly a fantastical, feel. There’s an account of discovering America , say, which might be real history or might be an imagined history. Choosing it is pushing the boundaries of the award, as we did with Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated The Electric State a couple of years ago. We don’t see verse novels often in science fiction. Giles’s poetry makes us see the world in a new way—doubly so in an outer space setting. I’ll definitely be pushing the judges over whether it is indeed a novel. But I think it’s the sort of book the prize exists to draw attention to for die-hard scifi readers, and to make non-scifi readers question their assumptions about the genre. Thinking about it, there’s a couple of science fiction novels in Welsh, and I’d love for translations of those to be submitted."