Yoke of Stars

R B Lemberg’s Birdverse stories are justifiably famous. You can find my review of The Four Profound Weaves elsewhere in Salon Futura. Yoke of Stars is more recent, and won Best Novella in the World Fantasy Awards last year. It is also available as part of the Pride Storybundle, which you should all go out and by before it closes.

Yoke of Stars concerns two people who are exiles in very different ways. Stone Orphan comes from a very communitarian society called the Shoal. Everyone in the Shoal is expected to behave exactly like everyone else. Then everyone will be safe. Thing of it as a shoal of fish, and indeed Stone Orphan has some piscine characteristics. In contrast, Ulín is a princess. She comes from a much more liberal society, but because of her social status everyone has ideas about how they can use her to further their political ambitions.

Stone Orphan has been expelled from the Shoal for being too curious. She (I think that’s the right pronoun, though it is hard to tell as she’s the narrator, but also there are no genders in the Shoal) has ended up at a school for assassins. She has just graduated and is awaiting her first client. Ulín has run away. She has been deeply wronged by people close to her. Given how the two meet, it seems that she wants one of them dead.

This is not a story about assassination. If you are familiar with Lemberg’s work you would be deeply disappointed if it was. The story proceeds with the two central characters telling each other their life stories, and discovering that they have far more in common that they thought when they first met.

If that was all that there was to the book, it would be a fine piece of literary fantasy, but this is Lemberg so inevitably there is more. Firstly there is the author as poet. The prose is as lush as we have cone to expect. But also there is the author as linguist. And the author as exiled Ukrainian Jew living in the increasingly Fascistic USA.

The linguistic angle is particularly fascinating, though way beyond my level of expertise. Lemberg has become interested in the possibility of constructing a language without verbs. She has even found someone who tried to do it. This has become Stone Orphan’s native tongue. Ulín, in contrast, is a language scholar, keen to learn as many different tongues as she can.

So while this might be a relatively short book, it is packed with ideas. I will be particularly recommending it to my friends who know a lot more about languages and linguistics than I do.

Oh, and it is a Lemberg Birdverse book. Of course it is full of queer people.

Title: Yoke of Stars
By: R B Lemberg
Publisher: Tachyon
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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