About Hortensia de los Santos
Exploring the Past, Imagining the Future
I am Hortensia de los Santos—writer, independent researcher, biologist, and lifelong observer of the natural world.
My work has never remained comfortably inside a single discipline. I move between history and science, archaeology and mythology, physiology and psychology, memory and metaphysics, the living world and the imagined one. What connects them is inquiry: the conviction that knowledge is not a collection of closed compartments, and that the questions left at the boundaries are often the most interesting ones.
History, particularly, has never seemed to me a closed book. From the Indus Valley to the Andes, from Egypt to Anatolia, I have followed the traces left in stone, symbol, text, landscape, and human memory. I am interested not only in what civilizations built, but in what they knew, what they remembered, and what later cultures may have misunderstood or forgotten.
I question interpretations that become accepted simply through repetition. Archaeological evidence, geological events, sacred texts, oral traditions, mythology, cosmology, and human memory may speak in very different languages, but sometimes they preserve fragments of the same question. I am interested in those points of convergence—and equally interested in distinguishing evidence, interpretation, possibility, and speculation.
Science and the Unanswered Question
I was born in Havana and trained in biology and human physiology. I spent years working within hospital research and later moved into other worlds, including management, computers, programming, writing, and independent study.
Scientific training gave me something I have never abandoned: respect for observation. It also taught me that knowledge changes.
A hypothesis is not made true by being attractive, nor false by being unconventional. Evidence must be examined, assumptions identified, and conclusions kept proportional to what can actually be demonstrated. At the same time, uncertainty should not become an excuse to stop asking questions.
That tension—between disciplined observation and intellectual freedom—runs through much of my work.
The Ancient and the Sacred
Ancient cultures did not divide existence according to our modern academic departments. Astronomy could be religion; architecture could encode cosmology; mythology could preserve history; ritual could carry observations whose original explanation had disappeared.
Sacred texts throughout the world contain accounts of gods, messengers, celestial journeys, extraordinary beings, destruction, renewal, and encounters between humanity and powers beyond ordinary experience. I do not believe such material should automatically be dismissed as primitive superstition, nor automatically accepted as literal history. I prefer the more difficult position: to listen carefully.
What did the people who preserved these traditions believe they were describing? What may have changed through translation, theology, politics, or thousands of years of retelling? What is metaphor? What might be memory? And what remains genuinely unexplained? Those questions are more valuable to me than premature certainty.
Fiction and Memory
My novels move through history, speculative fiction, myth, metaphysics, forgotten worlds, alternate possibilities, and the strange territory where memory and imagination meet. For me, fiction has never been mere escapism.
A story permits an idea to be examined where an essay cannot take it. It allows us to enter another consciousness, another civilization, another century—or another possible universe—and ask what might happen there. Sometimes fiction begins with research. Sometimes with memory. Sometimes with a question that refuses to disappear.
The distinction between imagination and evidence remains important. But imagination has its own intellectual function: it lets us explore possibility.
The Hermit Wolf
The Hermit Wolf emerged from another part of my life. I disappeared from much of the world for a time—not out of weakness, but in order to survive it. Like the wolf in winter, I withdrew to the cave. I watched. I remembered. Eventually I returned with a different voice.
The Hermit Wolf is the observer who walks at the margins: questioning accepted explanations, recording what she sees, sometimes serious, sometimes irritated, sometimes amused, and unwilling to pretend that the absurd is reasonable merely because everyone has become accustomed to it.
She is not a pseudonym and not quite a character.
She is the watcher.
The Hermit Wolf became the home of my essays, investigations, reflections, Truth Logs, and those inquiries that begin with something encountered in ordinary life and then refuse to remain ordinary.
The Orchidarium
The Orchidarium grew from the same impulse in a completely different direction.
It is a living botanical archive devoted to the individual orchids in my collection. Every plant has a history worth preserving: its identity and provenance, its arrival, roots and new growths, flowering, difficulties, recovery, repotting, changing seasons, and the particular care it requires.
Each orchid is treated as an individual specimen and assigned a permanent HDS accession number. Botanical names may change as classifications are revised; the identity of the individual plant does not.
Whenever possible, the archive uses photographs of the actual specimen, allowing its record to develop as the plant itself develops.
The Orchidarium is therefore more than a gallery of flowers. It is where botanical study, observation, memory, and care meet.
One Work, Different Rooms
My books, The Hermit Wolf, and The Orchidarium may appear at first to belong to different worlds.
They do. But they are rooms in the same house.
One preserves stories. One follows questions. One watches living things grow.
Across all of them runs the same habit of mind: observe carefully, preserve what might otherwise disappear, question what does not make sense, and never assume that because something is unknown it is therefore unknowable.
I have worn many cloaks over a lifetime—biologist, researcher, manager, programmer, writer, publisher, observer, wanderer. The subjects have changed. The underlying impulse has not.
Look again.
Look deeper.
And preserve the record.
