"O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!" But what if we could see others as they see themselves?New technology records the highlights of emotional experience for others to share. Buy a helmet and you can feel the exhilaration of an Olympic ski jumper, or the heat of a lucid dreamer's erotic imaginings. Commit a crime, and you may be sentenced to endure the suffering you inflicted on others.But such recordings may carry more information than the public has realized. What will criminals learn about their victims? When a husband is wrongfully convicted of injuring his wife, how will their marriage change? And what uses will a sociopath find for recordings of the experience of death? Karen A. Wyle was born a Connecticut Yankee, but moved every few years throughout her childhood and adolescence. After college in California, law school in Massachusetts, and a mercifully short stint in a large San Francisco law firm, she moved to Los Angeles. There she met her husband, who hates L.A. They eventually settled in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University.Wyle has been a voracious and compulsive reader as long as she can remember. She majored in English and American Literature major at Stanford University, which suited her, although she has in recent years developed some doubts about whether studying literature is, for most people, a good preparation for enjoying it. She has been reading science fiction for several decades, but also gobbles up character-driven mysteries, historical and contemporary romance, a limited amount of fantasy, and historical fiction, with the occasional foray into anything from chick lit to military history. Her fondness for picture books, whether from my own childhood or my children's, inspired her to write her own, illustrated by various marvelous artists.Wyle's voice is the product of almost five decades of reading both literary and genre fiction. It is no doubt also influenced, although she hopes not fatally tainted, by her years of practicing appellate law. Her personal history has led her to focus on often-intertwined themes of family, communication, the impossibility of controlling events, and the persistence of unfinished business. Her brand, to the extent she has figured out what it might be, is "compassionate and thoughtful fiction" -- except when it isn't fiction, as in slice-of-life picture books and nonfiction about American law.Wyle and her husband have two grown and wildly creative adult offspring, and still miss our sweet but neurotic dog, departed several years since.
