Born in Japan and raised in Amer­i­ca, George Hawkins has been an avid fan of fic­tion his whole life. Indoc­tri­nat­ed, he might say, as one of his ear­li­est mem­o­ries is of his father read­ing him J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit. To this day, he still remem­bers mar­veling at how Smaug’s gold­en hoard looked like liq­uid fire on the exquis­ite cov­er of the 1997 edi­tion, and won­der­ing what hid­den mean­ing those dwarvish runes etched into the trim­ming had.

Once he start­ed read­ing on his own, it imme­di­ate­ly became his favorite pas­time. While oth­er boys and girls were run­ning about and play­ing, Hawkins spent all day read­ing and re-read­ing his copies of Louis Sachar’s Holes and J.K. Rowl­ing’s Har­ry Pot­ter and the Philoso­pher’s Stone until they were bent beyond repair. Even­tu­al­ly, after many more books, he began to hone in on sto­ries with spe­cif­ic qual­i­ties, such as works with illus­tra­tions like Paul Stew­art and Chris Rid­del­l’s The Edge Chron­i­cles; irreg­u­lar pre­sen­ta­tion like Johnathan Stroud’s Bar­ti­maeus Sequence; or a strate­gic bent like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. These are qual­i­ties that influ­ence his taste to this day.

Of course, at the same time as he was read­ing too many books, Hawkins was also watch­ing movies and tele­vi­sion, as well as play­ing games. How­ev­er, his child­hood diet of Ghi­b­li films had set his stan­dards quite high, so it was­n’t until he saw Frank Darabon­t’s 1994 adap­ta­tion of The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion and the 2004 remake of Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca that he began to delve into visu­al media. It was only a few years after —around the end of high school— that he also began to dip his toes into drawn and ani­mat­ed works, and soon after, web fic­tion.

Through­out all those years of vora­cious­ly con­sum­ing oth­er peo­ple’s sto­ries, it nev­er once occurred to Hawkins that he might want to cre­ate one of his own. It was only after find­ing out that three of his favorite series were on hia­tus­es, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly fail­ing to find any more sto­ries that matched his tastes, that he decid­ed ‘screw it, I guess I’ll start writ­ing myself.’ Add a dash of sweat and sev­er­al years of hard work, and before he knew it, Chal­lenger’s Chase was born.

After long years of incu­ba­tion, the first chap­ter of Chal­lenger’s Chase was released at the start of 2025, and the series is ongo­ing to this day. Approx­i­mate­ly fif­teen books are planned for the series as a whole, and large seg­ments of the first three arcs have been draft­ed. How­ev­er, just as Chal­lenger’s Chase is a sto­ry with its eyes aimed up at the stars, but its feet plant­ed firm­ly on the ground, Hawkins knows this jour­ney will be a long one, and plans to take it one step at a time.