Behind the Songs is a series of short reflections on the worlds, ancient histories, and cosmology of my Songs of the Universe trilogy. In each post, I explore one idea—what it means within the story, how it connects to the larger journey, and how science, nature, philosophy, and imagination helped bring it to life.
Behind the Songs • Part 1
Before the First Song: Imagining the Birth of a Universe
When I began writing about Thalassa, I was thinking about an ocean, a wave, and someone who might surf it. By the time I reached The Spiritual Engineers, I was imagining what might have existed before there were oceans or worlds—or anyone to notice them. Somewhere along that journey, the question changed. How did a universe capable of producing stars and planets eventually produce beings who could listen to one another, feel longing, and love? I imagined its beginning as silence, followed by a tremor of awareness. Awareness became longing, longing softened into love, and love unfolded into light.
That opening belongs to the cosmology of the novels, but astronomy offers an extraordinary story of its own. The early universe expanded and cooled, allowing particles and eventually atoms to form. Gravity gathered matter into the first stars, where nuclear reactions began building heavier elements. Stellar evolution and explosions dispersed material that later generations of stars and planets would inherit. Our oceans, our bodies, and the rocks beneath our feet emerged from that long history. Before there could be someone standing beside a sea, there had to be stars capable of making the ingredients.
I find something deeply moving in that continuity. A planet forms from material circling a young star, cools, and develops its own complicated relationships among rock, water, atmosphere, and energy. On Earth, life emerged within those relationships and gradually began changing them. Organisms transformed the atmosphere, shaped soils, and participated in cycles that made other forms of life possible. As a marine ecologist, I spent much of my career studying parts of that unfolding story. Writing fiction allowed me to wonder what it might mean from the planet’s perspective.
Consciousness adds another mystery. We can study nervous systems, perception, learning, and behavior, yet the relationship between those processes and inward experience remains difficult to explain. I imagined a parallel between matter becoming organized enough to sustain life and awareness becoming capable of recognizing something beyond itself. A being senses its surroundings, encounters another being, and discovers that its existence involves more than its own survival. In the novels, longing begins there: the reaching outward that makes relationship possible.
Music became my way of expressing that movement. Different notes can enter a shared pattern while retaining their differences, and a song depends on intervals, pauses, and listening as much as sound. Love, too, asks us to remain ourselves while making room for someone else. The First Song gives that relationship a cosmological presence: creation unfolding into many forms that can still belong together.
Creation stories often carry questions about belonging alongside questions about beginnings. Mine does too. I wanted a universe whose earliest movement toward existence continued through stars, oceans, living beings, and their encounters. When Sage listens to Thalassa, she enters a relationship already unfolding around her. The song begins long before she arrives, but her willingness to hear it changes what becomes possible next.
