Finally I scanned the Orcadian several times to get the rhythm of the words, then read it aloud and honestly this felt the beast way of interacting with the text.

As someone from Ireland who has lived in Scotland, I found the Orkney fairly easy to read, though I always have more trouble with spoken Scots than written Scots. Darling was born into an obscenely wealthy business family, and is running away from that world, changing her name and face but aware that they will be using their enormous resources to track her down. I did not feel connected to the story, but appreciated some of the playful style and depiction of people on a space station just whiling away the time and trying to figure themselves out. A symphony o yotuns, peedie suns and langships tae Mars, in Deep Wheel Orcadia Harry Josephine Giles hauds the starns in the loof o thier haun, terraformin new warlds in Scots.They share in common that they all reside in Deep Wheel Orcadia – a Northern space station closest to the galactic centre, and they are all facing adversity. I'm well aware I'm feeding into some unpleasant commodification of culture here, but that does seem to be the major marketing/hype around the book.

I got a headache from the eyestrain trying to parse the potential meanings at least a couple of times. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. The struggles, inner and outer, of a space-whaling community facing the nagging realisation that the space-whales are space-sentient, in space. It was fun to see which words my English brain recognised at once (guff), while comparing to others that I couldn't have even guessed at (skrek). The story is told through a series of short poems; each a few pages long at most, and each with different structure.A space odyssey science fiction novel written in the Orcadian dialect in the form of an epic poem, if this isn’t enough to sell it to you read on. In my experience reading sci-fi (and to an extent other fantastical fiction) always involves interpreting new words or new uses of familiar words for concepts, technologies, and activities. We hop backwards and forwards across many residents of the station to see how their lives are lived, and what plays on their mind from day to day.