And We Will Sing into the Void — Afterword
By Samantha L. Strong
The idea for this story came to me as I was considering the cancer that I was fighting and watching the way capitalism is sucking our society dry. Like many sci-fi and fantasy stories, “And We Will Sing into the Void” is a metaphor—a twofold metaphor.
When cells go rogue inside our bodies, they consume, consume, consume, to the point where our entire organism is in jeopardy. Just like The Blighted One, a tumor starts as one cell that recruits more cells to turn on the rest of the body.
At times, I wished I could sit down and have a conversation with my tumors, to explain that if they keep going like that, we’re all going to die. Hoarding all the resources, taking all the blood and oxygen—that doesn’t work. An ecosystem only survives when it’s in balance, when the moments of life and death work in tandem. As much as our society struggles with the concept of death, it is a normal, natural part of living, one that keeps our entire body alive. When it’s time for cells to die, they die, and they’re replaced by young, new, healthy cells.
This metaphor extends to what we’re seeing in late-stage capitalism: the billionaires that suck up all the resources and give nothing back, who recruit sycophants who are content to be swept along on their coattails. I’m not suggesting anything nefarious against billionaires—because we can sit down and talk to those human beings. There are enough resources for all of us, and it makes no logical sense for a small group of people to hoard all the resources of the planet.
There is absolutely no reason that anyone should be starving or homeless when there are people in the world who could never spend all their wealth, even if they spent a million dollars a minute for the rest of their lives.
I wondered what it would take to change the way things are going. Billionaires don’t seem interested in the good of all, in loving their neighbors, in extending a hand to those who are suffering. The answer comes in this story: it takes those who are willing to fight against the blight, the bloat, the selfishness. We work together and take back the resources that have been stolen from us. I don’t have the answer to what that looks like in reality, but this story is meant to inspire those who do have the strategy and drive to help us transform.
Of course, the story wouldn’t be sci-fi without transformation. I truly believe that if we as a society can move past this perilous time we find ourselves in, we will come out the other side changed as a species. We can find beauty and wonder again, in ourselves and our children, by banding together and setting the course of history.
And that, truly, is how we will find peace. Together.
Samantha L. Strong writes dark and beautiful SFF stories about complicated characters. Like many Elder Millennials, she’d like to become an herbalist and live in an abandoned, haunted nunnery somewhere far away from people.
Samantha’s short fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, AE: The Science Fiction Review, and elsewhere, and she’s the former Executive Editor at Flash Fiction Online. She has four novels out about angels and demons: her Fallen Redemption trilogy and a companion novel. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok @SamanthaLStrong, and more of her writing is available on her website www.samanthalstrong.com.
Copyright © 2025 Samantha Sabovitch