Ross W Hathaway

Ross Hathaway spent more than forty years in the aerospace industry, apparently because merely standing on the ground and behaving himself never held much appeal.

He began in the United States Air Force as a navigator aboard C-141s, back when navigation involved maps, instruments, mathematics, and the comforting knowledge that several hundred thousand pounds of airplane were depending on you knowing where the planet was. From there he moved into commercial aircraft research, design, and manufacturing before eventually arriving at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, where being surrounded by experimental aircraft and people professionally interested in doing unreasonable things at high speed probably seemed perfectly normal.

His wife calls him “her rocket scientist.”

Ross insists that he is a propulsion engineer.

This distinction matters primarily to propulsion engineers.

Eventually, after four decades spent helping real machines challenge gravity, aerodynamics, common sense, and occasionally budget committees, Ross retired to small-town Missouri with his loving wife, too many cats, and enough hobbies to suggest that retirement was badly misunderstood.

Then things got strange.

Having spent most of his life trying to get humanity safely into the sky, Ross began sending imaginary people into situations considerably less safe. His fiction has featured bureaucrats negotiating with cryptids, government agencies attempting to regulate the supernatural, demons filing reports explaining why catastrophes are actually departmental successes, oceans developing opinions about humanity, librarians confronting things that should not be shelved, duelists battling with everything from ghosts to customer-service departments, monsters seeking career advice, saints encountering spam filters, and assorted heroes whose principal qualification for adventure appears to be the phrase, “Watch this.”

There have also been dragons, vampires, Mothmen, djinn, Fey, Bigfoot, Cthulhu, angry mythological entities, highly litigious supernatural beings, suspicious government forms, and at least one universe in which paperwork may be humanity’s best defense against cosmic horror.

This may explain the cats. They are probably supervising him.

Ross has always wanted the stars. When engineering proved insufficient to reach all of them, he discovered another method.

He became a weaver of words and worlds. It is cheaper than building rockets. Usually.

Ross Hathaway now writes speculative fiction ranging from science fiction and alternate history to fantasy, horror, adventure, and black comedy, frequently combining several of them before anyone can stop him.

He lives in Missouri with his wife, his cats, his hobbies, and an increasingly crowded collection of imaginary people demanding sequels.