Language is not disembodied—it exists in communities, and it is learned and spoken by people. Both Ulín and Stone Orphan want to understand. This is the bridge they can build together, even though bridges do not always exist, or are unhelpful or inaccessible, or are destroyed. The necessity of bridges is that we cannot always flicker from one person to another; often, crossing requires difficult and careful labor. Perhaps we must meet each other first, before travel can become instantaneous.
Just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I was working on translation theory research—looking at how gender was translated in the works of Cold War era science fiction, from English to Russian and from Russian to English. When Russia’s war against Ukraine broke out, I became involved in translating war poetry from Ukrainian to English, and had many opportunities to connect and collaborate with poets writing about their experiences of war. You can find some of these translations and many others in Chytomo Magazine’s English-language issues of Ukrainian war poetry. There are so many vital and necessary things yet to discover and discuss about language, and cultures, and translation. I believe that the work of translation and of linguistic research remains vital and necessary, even as technology gains traction—and minority languages continue to be endangered as hegemonic languages expand.
I am a person who can think about a single thing for decades, turning and turning it around. I’ve been rotating this story in my mind for as long as I’ve been writing. Now you have read it—thank you. I hope you can come away from this book with my hope for the world, and for us: that we are not prisoners of our hurts, that we can be together and yet free.
Concepts and further reading:
Many ideas about the collectivist society in this book were inspired by my lived experience as an ex-Soviet person (as well as by my academic research into this history). Stone Orphan’s and Old Song’s judgment harkens back to Soviet-era comrades’ courts.
For the concept of Figure and Ground, take a look at Leonard Talmy’s theories. Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems. Cambridge (MA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For motion verbs and motion events research—begin with the work of Dan Slobin; I recommend his chapter, “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events.” Slobin, D. I. (2004). In S. Strömqvist, & L. Verhoeven (eds.), Relating Events in Narrative, Vol. 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives (pp. 219-257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
There are many excellent articles and books about encoding motion events in the languages of the world: search Google Scholar for “motion events” or “motion verbs” and your language of interest.
For cognition and space, I recommend Levinson’s work: Levinson, S. C. (2003). Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Vol. 5). Cambridge University Press.
Finally, a lot of Ulín’s research and my worldbuilding reflects my special interest in etymologies and in the Nostratic theory research during the Soviet regime. Roughly speaking, the Nostratic theory postulates that the major language families of the Eurasian continent and of North Africa (the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Finno-Ugric language families, as well as other languages and language families) all had a common ancestor, the Nostratic proto-language. I find the theory itself problematic and unprovable (at least, at this stage of our knowledge and documentation), but the research done under the Soviet regime is deeply valuable. Because universities were governmentally funded and because historical linguistics research was often carried out in teams, Soviet-era scholars had unprecedented opportunities to work on topics which are perceived as “useless” and not “commercially viable” in the Western academy. These scholars include Soviet Jewish historical linguists V.M. Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, both of whom worked on Nostratic theory and dictionaries. Dolgopolsky taught at first at the Moscow State University and then in Haifa University, and his monumental Nostratic Dictionary was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. You can download a free pdf from Cambridge: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1302376.pdf
I’ve spent a lot of time with this book, looking at Dolgopolsky’s endless and massive word comparisons (again, this is a special interest, the core of my own research is elsewhere). You see some of this reflected in just a single word that appears in the book. Dolgopolsky reconstructs *kälû as a Nostratic word for woman, or more precisely a woman of the opposite exogamous moiety within an exogamic cultural system. This is reflected in geographically far-flung languages such as Semitic kall-at- ‘bride,’ Old Georgian kal-i ‘daughter, maid,’ Finnish käly ‘sister-in-law,’ and many others (Dolgopolsky 2008: 817-818).
In a different, yet to be published fantasy book of mine, Ulín proposes a unity of dreamway languages, which later comes to be disproven—but the research is still meaningful. This is my overarching take on Nostratic theory. We arrive at knowledge despite past and ongoing injustices of political systems, and the failures and controversies around the conclusions we might reach. Our processes may be flawed and the conclusions may be wrong, but the words and connections are there.
Acknowledgements
Many ideas about the collectivist society in this book were inspired by my lived experience as an ex-Soviet person (as well as by my academic research into this history). Stone Orphan’s and Old Song’s judgment harkens back to Soviet-era comrades’ courts.
Thank you to the early readers of my stories: Kathryn Schild, Shweta Narayan, Jonathan Cohen, and Diana Dima. Shweta, thank you for telling me that I should write (this, and other things). Kathryn, thank you for telling me that this was good. It’s a very different story now and I’m a very different person now, but this is also still the same. Jonathan and Diana, thank you for finding value and meaning in my early work, before I trusted or knew myself.
Thank you to all the Birdverse readers over the years, to my wonderful Patreon subscribers who have supported my work for so long. Many thanks to my publishing team—my incredible editor Jaymee Goh, who gets my work so deeply. To my agent Mary C. Moore, for her hard work on my behalf; to Jacob Weisman, Jill Roberts, Kasey Lansdale, Rick Klaw, Elizabeth Story, and Anne Zanoni. I am so happy to work with you all.
Thank you above all to Bogi Takács After toward came together.
To A.: I am sorry I could not do better, faster, and more decisively. I don’t know if this breath will ever be sovereign, but if and when it will prevail, you’ll be the first to know.
About the Author
Le Guin Feminist Fellow R. B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender fantasist, poet, and professor originally from L’viv, Ukraine.
R. B.’s first Birdverse novella The Four Profound Weaves (Tachyon) was a finalist for the Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Their second Birdverse book from Tachyon, The Unbalancing, was selected for many best books of the year lists such as the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Book Riot, and Autostraddle. R. B.’s first short fiction collection, The Geometries of Belonging (Fairwood Press) came out in 2022 and was a finalist for the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Their poetry memoir Everything Thaws (Ben Yehuda Press) came out in 2023. 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 of the cumulative books and fountain pens. You can find R. B. on Instagram at @rblemberg, on Patreon at patreon.com/rblemberg, and at their website rblemberg.net.
Illustration list
"Downward" pg 1 in paper copy
"Away From" pg 11 in paper copy
"Nautilus" pg 54 in paper copy
