Yoke of Stars

[psocoptera]

Yoke of Stars, R.B. Lemberg, 2024 Birdverse novella. In the way that Four Profound Weaves was directly tied to Cloth of Winds, this one turned out to be pretty directly tied to Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power, and also minorly to Profound Weaves/Cloth of Winds, and in rereading Portrait of the Desert it turned out that one was connected to The Unbalancing in ways I totally hadn't gotten when I read that, and some of the earlier stories also circle around certain of the same characters from different angles/relationships/periods of their lives. I feel like I had maybe been thinking of the Birdverse as primarily a *world*, a setting, with stories set about totally different people in different places, and there is some of that, but it is also a saga, telling the history of a hero (in the epic sense) and stories that branch out from them from the people around them. And it's interesting to see how Lemberg has revisited/revised this key character ranging from their early appearances in 2011 and 2015 stories to their appearance here. (Also I'm starting to feel like this is a fandom that could really use someone doing some meta fanwork - maybe a dramatis personae, to help catch characters if/when they show up again... maybe a really nice Complete Birdverse edition someday with all the miscellaneous stories, which I think are not all in the recent collection...)

Anyways, I liked this a lot. The structure is two people telling their stories to each other and we slowly start to see how it is that they have both come to be where they are and what that means for each other. Some neat moments and worldbuilding and different perspectives on the world's lore and some events we've heard about before. I thought it had a clearer throughline than The Unbalancing and definitely makes me curious what we'll see in this world from Lemberg next.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Why is it called the Birdverse? Are actual birds involved?

[psocoptera]

God is a Bird, who brought twelve stars to the world in her tail, and also appears to people as a bird when they die, with everyone getting a different kind of bird. (This is where I feel like I should suggest a jumping-in point if you're curious... Lemberg has said that they're writing the stories for people to be able to start anywhere, but maybe Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, which was a 2015 Nebula-nominated novelette?)

[elysdir]

Thank you for the jumping-in point! One reason I haven’t read these is that I didn’t know where to start (and hadn’t gotten around to looking for answers to that).