R.B. Lemberg is joining us today to talk about their novel, Yoke of Stars Here’s the publisher’s description:
In the School of Assassins, Stone Orphan waits for a first assignment. After their first kill, they will graduate and attain the coveted cloth of bone. But instead of a commission, Stone Orphan gets an inquisitive linguist, Ulín. Ulín has heard the Orphan Star’s song of despair, mirroring her own, and drawing her to the School of Assassins. But Ulín is far more interested in learning Stone Orphan’s language than deciding whom she wishes to kill.Unable to contain their curiosity, Stone Orphan offers to exchange stories with Ulín to help her decide the fate of three men. By turns, Stone Orphan and Ulín narrate tales of love, suffering, exile, and self-determination, and two wounded souls find hope in each other through the radical act of listening.
What’s R.B.’s favorite bit?
In so many ways, YOKE OF STARS is a self-indulgent book for me, a multilingual immigrant linguist who wrote a book with a linguist main character and a bilingual migrant main character. This book is rich in linguistic worldbuilding, it contains so many thoughts about translation and diaspora; and I love so many elements of this book that it’s difficult for me to identify just one to discuss. I’m going to go with tea.
The two main characters, Ulín the linguist and Stone Orphan the assassin, sit down to determine who of the three people who harmed Ulín would become a target for Stone Orphan to kill. Before long, the two of them start exchanging stories. It starts out simple, but soon evolves into braided narratives of trauma, exile, betrayal, and trust.
At one point, Stone Orphan stops mid-story, too upset by what they are telling. They ask Ulín to take over, and share something of her story now, but Stone Orphan notices that Ulín is also upset. Something about Stone Orphan’s story reminded Ulín of her own pain. So they stop. They reassure each other that it’s all right to stop and take a break. Stone Orphan makes tea, and they drink it together.
Later, the tea cups comforting in our palms, she asks me what will happen if she won’t be
able to trade stories with me anymore.
I shrug. “We could sit here together, until we figure this out.” There is a feeling of calm
in me now, a warm feeling like the moss that blooms on the siltway isles in early autumn. It’s been years since I felt this.
After this rest, they both find the strength to go on.
In so many ways, YOKE OF STARS is a trauma book. It tackles abuse, exile, the struggle for bodily autonomy. But these two characters create a space for each other to be heard. Too often in stories, action just goes on and on and on, traumatic events upon traumatic events without much opportunity for the characters or the reader to breathe and process the emotional impact of events. When I was writing this work, I was thinking of my queer neurodivergent communities, the principles of mutual support where we do our best to hear and accommodate each other rather than apply pressure to get quick results. I’m thinking a lot about how deep listening is such a radical act, and especially so if we do it across cultures and languages. This is what I want from this world, I think. A space to hear and be heard, a cup of warm tea, a reassurance that it is all right to rest.
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BIO:
R. B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender fantasist, poet, and professor who was born in L’viv, Ukraine. R. B.’s Birdverse novella The Four Profound Weaves (Tachyon, 2020) was a finalist for the Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy awards, as well as an Otherwise Award honoree. They are also a Le Guin Feminist Fellow. R. B.’s poetry memoir Everything Thaws was published by Ben Yehuda Press in 2022. Their stories and poems have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, We Are Here: Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, and many other venues. R. B. lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with their spouse and fellow author Bogi Takács, their child Mati, and all the cumulative books and fountain pens.
