Gene Roth

The books

Each one starts somewhere real. A Cold War waste site in Missouri. A reprocessed satellite altimetry record over the eastern Atlantic. A spent rocket stage striking the far side of the Moon. A dive that ends in collapse under the Great Blue Hole. Groundwater moving between two spring systems in the Ozarks that every map assumes holds still.

The story is fiction. The thing that started it is not.

What interests me is rarely the anomaly itself. It is what the anomaly costs the person who notices it, and what it costs them again when they decide whether to say so out loud.

The day job

Before this, and still alongside it, I spent fifteen years inside federal regulatory systems, most recently as the FAA Director of National External Operations, Policy & Compliance Programs.

I did not watch that work from outside. I did it. You learn quickly that the record is never as complete as the decision it has to support, and that the job is to decide on what you actually have, and to let your principles carry the part the evidence cannot.

It is not a separate interest from the fiction. Both begin with a record, a measurement, and the point at which the two stop agreeing. The consulting practice lives at generoth.com.

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