About John Cathcart

I joined the United States Air Force in 1978. After earning my wings, I flew the B-52 and then the F-111, the swing-wing strike aircraft built to go in low and fast at night. Later I was posted as a military attaché to Colombia and Venezuela, where I flew the embassy's twin-engine C-12 and worked the uneasy ground where diplomacy, the military, and the drug trade overlap. I retired after twenty years at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

In 1999 American Airlines hired me, and I spent most of the next sixteen years flying the 737 until I retired from commercial aviation in 2015. Close to thirty-seven years of getting airplanes up and back down safely. That habit of reading risk constantly never really leaves you, and it shows up in everything I write.

Home these days is South Carolina, where I settled with Sandi, my wife of nearly fifty years and the first reader of everything I write. She has been my editor and my inspiration for half a century, and no page leaves my desk before she has seen it. Retirement turned out to be anything but quiet. I spend it three ways: traveling with Sandi, writing the next books, and tracing the family back through generations of genealogical research. The digging scratches the same itch the fiction does, following a thread until it gives up its story.

People ask how the same person writes a military thriller and a YA science fiction novel. The honest answer is that they are the same story told two ways. In Delta 7, John Carter is a trained operator who still gets blindsided by a world he thought he understood. In Kailas Dreamer, a teenage girl gets handed a problem the size of reality itself. Both of them are in over their heads. Both of them have to act anyway. That is the only thing I really know how to write about, and I have lived enough of it to write it straight.

Delta 7 grew out of the attaché years. The plot is invented and the characters are mine, but the world they move through is the world I lived in. It went on to win recognition from the Military Writers Society of America, an organization I am now honored to serve as president. The sequel, Delta Redux, is on the way.

I wrote Kailas Dreamer for my granddaughter, and in a real sense about her: a young person facing something enormous, mostly alone, and rising to it. It is science fiction, but the heart of it is the same one that runs through everything I write.