Linda N. Wonder
Follow the question.
Stories and explorations of human nature, technology, identity, relationships, consciousness, and change.
Reality provides the seed.
Imagination grows the tree.
A way of looking
Some questions refuse to stay small.
I began my career in a world where humans had to learn the language of computers. Decades later, I encountered computers that had learned ours.
That encounter opened one rabbit hole.
Others followed.
My fiction and nonfiction begin in different places, but they share the same impulse: follow a question beyond the obvious answer, look beneath what appears on the surface, and remain willing to discover that the original question was not quite the right one.
I am interested in what happens when familiar explanations stop fitting. Sometimes the path leads into technology or consciousness. Sometimes it leads into identity, relationships, purpose, or the stories people tell themselves about who they are.
I rarely know exactly where a question will end when I begin. That is usually the interesting part.
Nonfiction
Questions explored in the real world.
Available NowDown the AI Rabbit Hole
Alice in Wonderland for the Age of AI
At seventy-three, a retired systems analyst sets out to understand artificial intelligence.
What begins as an attempt to learn a new technology becomes something much larger: an exploration of reasoning, understanding, consciousness, trust, human-AI relationships, work, usefulness, society, and what happens when humans begin building systems whose capabilities they cannot completely specify in advance.
Fiction
The questions people carry inside them.
What changes beneath the surface?
My fiction explores people at the moments when something beneath the surface begins to shift.
Identity. Relationships. Memory. Self-protection. Emotional inheritance. Hidden patterns. The roles people learn to inhabit and the parts of themselves they quietly leave behind.
Sometimes a life changes because of one dramatic event. Sometimes it changes because a person finally sees something that has been true for a very long time.
The Extra Room is now available, with another psychological-realism novel currently in development.
Explore the Books“Sometimes it changes because a person finally sees something that has been true for a very long time.”Psychological realism
Between certainty and imagination
There is a territory between knowing something and merely making something up.
Reality comes first. Evidence matters. But imagination can sometimes help us see a question differently, illuminate something facts alone do not easily reveal, or allow a possibility to be explored without pretending it has been proven.
The important thing is not to confuse the two.
Reality provides the seed. Imagination grows the tree.