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 4
The V’korr:
Where Silence Finds a Foothold
When I began developing the trilogy’s cosmology, I needed the ultimate villain. If awareness could become longing, love, and light, something had to threaten that unfolding. I imagined an anti-consciousness: a presence that could unravel the relationships through which the universe was discovering itself. My earliest outlines approached that danger through civilizations whose technological reach had grown far beyond their capacity for compassion. Eventually, that idea became the V’korr.
From The Spiritual Engineers, p. 3:
“But light cast shadows. The silence did not vanish; it remained as memory, as unrealized possibility, as the echo of what had existed before distinction. From that echo the V’korr emerged—not fully as beings, but as negative resonance given coherence wherever relationship failed. They did not create the fractures. They inhabited it. Fear, grief, hatred, certainty hardened against difference—these gave them form. The deeper the separation, the more present they became.”
The Kardashev scale gave me an initial sense of their potential reach. It classifies hypothetical civilizations by the energy available to them, progressing from planetary resources (Type I), through stellar power (Type II) , to the galactic scale of Type III. It measures energy, leaving questions of wisdom and morality unanswered. I wondered what would happen if something capable of influencing an entire galaxy had become profoundly hostile to life. How much evolutionary history could disappear before another civilization even recognized the danger?
In my early imagined universe, sentient life was rare, and civilizations capable of communicating or traveling between stars were rarer still. Most remained constrained by distance; many destroyed themselves as their power increased. Consciousness needed physical lives through which to experience, learn, and change, making every inhabited world consequential. A destructive civilization could erase possibilities that had taken billions of years to develop. Others could preserve those possibilities and carry awareness further.
My early notes also imagined a distant Great Union—a gathering of souls and an eventual release from the cycle of birth and suffering associated with saṃsāra. As the story developed, I became increasingly interested in what such belonging would require. The First Song offered connection that could preserve difference. The darkness began to represent the terrible alternative: an end to separation achieved by extinguishing everything capable of relationship.
That shift led me beyond a technologically advanced enemy toward the quantum phantoms Kiri describes. The phrase belongs to the novel’s speculative cosmology. I imagined presences existing more as potential than substance, acquiring coherence wherever relationships failed. Their origin lay in the unrealized silence left by creation—the possibility of existence never having become distinct, vulnerable, or aware. The V’korr remembered that undivided condition, and their memory became hunger.
Fear, isolation, and hardened certainty give that hunger a foothold. Fear can narrow our attention until another life becomes only a threat. Certainty can make cruelty seem necessary, even virtuous, when we stop allowing experience to challenge what we believe. Isolation leaves suffering enclosed within a person or community, beyond the reach of those who might help carry it. In the novels, these fractures allow the V’korr to become increasingly present.
Grief itself is no failure; it grows from having cared. What interests me is what happens around it—whether pain can remain shared, or becomes something denied, exploited, and turned against others. The V’korr flourish where those possibilities close. They amplify fractures already forming within living worlds.
Yet my earliest outline contained a small resistance: even the tiniest ability to love something could keep darkness from becoming complete. I kept that possibility because it gave ordinary lives significance within an immense struggle. Someone listens, accepts help, or recognizes another being’s suffering. Each leaves a relationship through which something new might still emerge. The V’korr threaten a universe learning to know itself; love keeps that learning unfinished.
Leave a Reply