“I really believe that in the post-modern, 21st century world, it’s very hard for a minority language to stay vital without a vital literary scene—and specifically without science fiction.”
During this year’s Aye Write! Book Festival in Glasgow, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Armstrong, a Seattle-born, Skye-based academic and author who has written what his publisher, Clàr, is promoting as “the first ever Scottish Gaelic sci-fi novel for adults”, Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach. (That translates as On a Glittering Black Sea, by the way.)
In a somewhat rare example of forward thinking, and the marshalling of resources, I managed to pitch two online interviews based on our chat. The first, which focuses on the cultural and political issues around writing a science fiction novel in a minority language, was published in April by the website Bella Caledonia and can be found here.
“One of the conceits in the novel is that everybody speaks Gaelic. I grew up with sci-fi movies in which everyone spoke with my dialect of English — they spoke West Coast urban American English, so for me it’s no less weird an idea to imagine Hans Solo at the controls of the Millennium Falcon speaking in Gaelic than in West Coast American English.”
I took a more genre-specific, writer-focused approach for the interview that can now be found here on the Arc magazine blog.
