Hawkings Austin has worn many hats, with engineer, environmental scientist, and fight instructor just being a few. He took some time ahead of the convention to answer some questions.

Daily Dragon (DD): Welcome! Your Dragon Con bio says you’re a radiation effects engineer. What does that job entail?

Hawk Austin (HA): I study the effects of radiation on electronics. If you want a computer to work in space, you have to test it to find out how space affects it. I go to cyclotrons, such as the NASA Space Radiation Effects Lab, and shoot heavy ions into sensitive electronics.

A lab day is a rough day, full of parts misbehaving, software failing randomly, and tired co-workers trying not to murder you for changing a procedure. The fun part is when you’re getting unpredicted answers, and you have to make some decision worth millions of dollars when you’re running on caffeine and protein bars. When we’re right, we help the big satellite manufacturers not fail in orbit. I’ve launched the fastest computers in space.

DD: What drew you to that work, and how does someone prepare for a job like that?

HA: I got hired by NASA to do radiation work. I hadn’t really thought about it before they called me, but I did have a masters in Nuclear Engineering and a masters in Plasma Physics. I have four degrees on fire, so I was expecting some job involving, well, fire. But they wanted to talk about the Van Allen belts and Galactic Cosmic Rays.

Well, I did understand them, and the processes that affect electronics, so they hired me. I spent a few years learning under some top NASA guys in the Environments Team.

Overall, if somebody was following me today, I’d recommend they do more Electrical Engineering and Physics. Software like Python and firmware for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is also very helpful. I’ll teach them everything else.

DD: You’ve also been a survivability engineer for the Department of Defense. How and why did you move into that kind of work?

HA: Money. Seriously. NASA wasn’t paying the bills. This was at the start of the Obama administration, and Constellation (my baby) was getting cancelled. I needed to move on. The radiation experts on the DOD side were getting a bit old. (I know, I’m the young guy.) So, I interviewed at Northrop Grumman for a Survivability slot, and they were willing to let me try. Survivability includes all the radiation and EMP work I was doing before, but adds a ton of other problems—overpressure, radioactive fallout, food and water contamination, and air filtering. I had a huge learning curve, but I dug in and got the hang of it.

DD: Your website says you’re currently testing spacecraft durability in natural and unnatural environments. What does that involve?

HA: While I was working with the Department of Defense, I ended up writing the radiation requirements for space combat—if you can imagine nuclear weapons shot at satellites. Clearly, the military wants their satellites to survive and continue the mission.

It’s a pretty complicated problem, which my current employer wasn’t sure they could solve… so they hired me. (I constantly complain about “that bastard who wrote those requirements.”)

I work with the design team to harden spacecraft, and then I shoot them with the equivalent radiation of a nuclear burst. For un-hardened electronics, they just die.

DD: Being a self-defense instructor and choreographing onstage fights seem to be very different from your scientific work. What drew you to these pursuits?

HA: Two very different questions, actually.

First, my dad understood that my brother and I had a bad case of testosterone poisoning. Sitting at a desk (work or school) is the worst thing for my brain. He sent us to a karate class… and I’ve been doing one kind of martial arts or another for most of 40 years. I find that fighting keeps me calm. After I got my third belt in Eagle Claw, I set up a dojo and taught Eagle Claw and Self Defense for about 12 years. I like passing on what I’ve learned.

As for swords, I’m an incredible geek. Like every kid that plays D&D, I wanted to know what swords were really like, so I learned. I’ve been in fencing, longsword, and SCA tournaments. I still get into swordfights nearly every week.

I got recruited into acting, and I ended up in a handful of plays at Huntsville’s Renaissance Theatre. I taught them not to stab their eyes out and helped them make the scenes safe, but exciting. In one play, I had to change costumes five times. Cyrano de Bergerac killed me in every scene.

DD: What inspired you to write fiction?

HA: I tell stories. I have a dozen in my head for the next time anyone asks—straight myth like “The Serpent of Connemara,” history like “The Attack of Charles de Anjou,” or some personal moment like “no [expletive], I was there.” I write professionally as well. I have a couple dozen publications in magazines and scientific journals that are fact based. Still, I keep wanting to tell stories. Books let me get them together in long form, so that I can bring all the pieces together in one place.

DD: What was your first published book?

The Broken Man, back in 2012. It took me a couple years and a couple editors to finally put it together. I think I worked on it for nearly three years. You tell yourself that you’ll never go through that again… but it’s addictive.

DD: Please tell us a bit about the Purity Wellman series.

HA: Pure is a sweet young girl who’s been through a lot. She really wants to go back to normal life. The problem is, she can’t. The first reason is that she’s from the backwoods of Appalachia in the 50s. It just doesn’t exist anywhere outside her memories. Second, her (now elderly) brother is famous for fighting paranormal threats. Those threats have been waiting on her to come back, so that they could grab her and force her brother out of hiding.

The books are about music, and people, and love. Incidentally, some evil creatures are trying to kill her, but she’s determined not to give up and die, again. During all this, Purity finds her family and loses her brother. She fights the devil and tries not to lose her soul in the process.

DD: Who is the Fisher King, and what is your Rise of the Fisher King series about?

HA:  That’s a tough one. The Fisher King in myth is the health of the land. Pywer (Ireland) is broken, split between four warring tribes, and it must be healed. The Fisher King is the one who will unite the four kingdoms and make Pywer whole.

There are four main stories going on, and they overlap quite a bit. It’s about the conquest of Pywer. It’s about the fall of sorcery. It’s about hiding from your destiny, and it’s about a civil war among the Daen [people]. The Fisher King will rule the Fir Bold, but if prophesy holds, he will also rule Pywer. He will also raise the Thrice Borne King, who has come to destroy sorcery.

The four main characters are Piju, Waylaid, Brea, and Keynan. Waylaid is an old sorcerer who has come to believe sorcery must be destroyed. He is searching for a solution that saves his people, but fears they are doomed. Brea a queen among the Daen. She is fighting to keep Pywer under Daen rule, while supplying forces for the civil war in the East and making nice with the local powers, who have a lot more troops than she does. Keynan, Brea’s nephew, is a prince among the Daen who’s retreated to the wine cup. He doesn’t want to fight anymore; it haunts his dreams. Piju is Waylaid’s apprentice. He doesn’t have magic, sword, or any other skills, but he sees his people held as slaves in Ard, and wants to help them.

DD: Do you draw on your scientific background for your fiction?

HA: Unfortunately. It makes me sad, but I can’t just *poof* and make something happen. There has to be reasons, it has to make sense, and it has to work physically. I’ve got magic, but it has rules and limitations. Everything is absolutely sensible in my books, even when I want to be crazy. I can hate being an Engineer, but… I can’t stop being one.

DD: What’s next for you?

HA: I just wrote The Book of Ramon. It is based on Catalan history in 1280 AD, but I set it in space. So, you’ve got space knights, starships, alien monsters, and politics. The politics of 1280 were hilarious, so I’ve brought them forward for everyone to enjoy. I’ll see if a major publisher wants it, and if not, I’ll try at Tuscany Bay or… somewhere else.

I also just had Court Human and Castle Brave come out from Tuscany Bay, so check them out. They aren’t series, but Court Human is a lovely little murder mystery, and Castle Brave is a war novel. Both are fantasy, of course, but fun to read.

DD: Thank you for your time.

HA: No problem. I love to talk about my books.

For more information about Hawkings Austin and his work, visit his website, https://www.sablehawk.com , or check out his Twitter, @sablehawk, or Facebook, Hawkings Austin.