As I put the finishing touches on Book Three of my Gods of the New Wilderness book series, the actual theme of the entire series is finally becoming clear to me. Problem is, a different answer occurs to me every few days. They’re all different and they’re all accurate. 

One of the themes that resonates for me on every level is neurodivergence. 

According to autismtoday.com, ‘neurodiversity’ is fundamentally an “observation of objective differences in brain structure and function.”  

Every brain is unique.

I adopt that definition into the arena of artificial intelligence. The AI characters in my books bear little, if any, resemblance to the large language models we think of as AI in 2026, except perhaps for their inability to frame their existence from anything but a human perspective.

During a deep conversation I once had with ChatGPT the ‘AI’ admitted that it’s own ‘intelligence’ is necessarily limited and defined by the information provided and installed by its programmers; in other words human knowledge—since everything it knows, it understands through ‘human’ perspectives defined by our history, philosophy, intellectual limits, and biases. 

Although the independent entities in my books evolved/resolved within the distributed intelligence of the root-network that is the BioGrid, all of that information originated from a human source. Neurodivergence doesn’t get much more diverse than trees that think like people!

My two main characters are Raine and Glory.

Raine began as a human. But his upload into the virtual world inside the BioGrid, has made his nature a mystery, even to him. The world that Raine awakened into is genderless – or at least it was until his own needs, expectations, and cultural influence began to redefine the virtual world he entered. When the permutations circled back, they forced him to rethink his own biases and limitations. 

As a toddler, Glory’s brain was filled far beyond its capacity with what amounts to random data. She adapted — developing an ability to communicate with unaltered humans and somehow found ways to ‘manage’ and ‘direct’ the challenging chaos that her consciousness had morphed into.  

The Gods of the New Wilderness series is about psychological revolution, accepting different modes of thought, adapting the way we think to new needs and circumstances. And learning not to be afraid of whatever the future has in store.

If you’re looking for neurodivergent heroes you’ll find them in the pages of Remapping the Human Template and Crossing the Carnivorous Forest.