Richard Phillips Rho Agenda Blog

The Characters in The Rho Agenda June 24, 2009

Richard Phillips, 1:25 pm (Phoenix time), June 24th, 2009

Last night, June 23rd, I had the pleasure to be the guest on Annette Jones’ show, Paranormal Talk, discussing my Amazon Kindle best selling sci-fi series, The Rho Agenda.  You can listen in via the following link:
Paranormal Talk Radio Interview

The interview included a discussion of the principal characters in The Second Ship: Book One of The Rho Agenda.  The three main protagonists are three high school juniors at Los Alamos High School and I have often been asked, “With the violent adult content of this book, why did you choose three teens as your main characters?”  To answer this, I will digress just a bit.

In my opinion, no matter how good the story, if you don’t have characters that people care about, then you have nothing.  Novels commonly have a couple of different types of characters:

1. characters who are who they are (James Bond, Monk, Columbo, etc.) and no amount of action is going to change them.

2. characters who think they know who they are, but when put through extreme pressure, find that facade stripped away, revealing their underlying nature to themselves and to the reader.

I hold a great deal of fascination for this second type of character.  In the Rho Agenda Series, we have three bright and confident young people who stumble onto something that thrusts them into an adult world well beyond their capacity to handle.  Being aware of this fact, they attempt to get help by dropping an anonymous tip on an NSA monitored network, an act that places them at even greater risk.  As it progresses, The Rho Agenda series puts these three high schoolers through a meat grinder that rips apart their comfortable lives.  This results in characters that discover exactly what they are made of, a view of themselves that is very much changed from who they imagined themselves to be at the story’s beginning.

If you would like to hear a complete discussion of the characters in The Second Ship, I invite you to listen to Annette’s interview through the link above.