Richard Phillips Rho Agenda Blog

Richard Phillips on Coast To Coast AM August 31, 2009

Hello Rho Agenda fans.  I’m back from Hawaii and it’s been a busy last several weeks with a multitude of interviews across the country.   Saturday night, Aug 29, I had the privilege  of sitting down for a three hour interview with Ian Punnett on Coast To Coast AM for a rowdy and very entertaining interview.   As is his norm, Ian pressed me repeatedly on the exact nature of my work at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, how much of the technologies there might be based upon technologies actually reverse engineered from an alien craft the government may have in its possession, which technologies in my best selling Rho Agenda series are on the verge of being released to the public, etc.  While classification level prevented me from answering each and every one of his questions, the interchange led to a full hour of listener call-ins and a lively show.  I invite all of you to listen for yourselves through the following link:

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/08/29

Thanks to the fine folks at Coast To Coast AM for their effort in setting this up.

Richard Phillips, Author of the Amazon Kindle #1 best selling sci-fi adventure, The Second Ship.

Getting Ready for Roswell June 28, 2009

The Second Ship by Richard Phillips

Well, it’s Sunday Jun 28th and I have three blog talk radio interviews before I start packing for my week in Roswell, New Mexico for the annual UFO convention. While I’m in town I’ll do a television interview on KBIM TV, give a lecture on my best selling Rho Agenda series, and do several days of book signings at the International UFO Museum. I don’t expect to have much time to update my blog this week but as soon as I can work it into my schedule, I’ll bring everyone up to date.

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.

Interview on Paranexus Universe June 19, 2009

Richard Phillips, 8:40 a.m. (Phoenix Time)

I had fun chatting last night with Doug and Grant on the Paranexus Universe show …
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ParaNexus/2009/06/19/Life-on-Other-Planets-It-Does-Exist-with-Richard-Phillips-1

Topics ranged across the interstellar map, pretty much whatever those two entertaining characters could dream up, concluding with my typical admonition to listeners.  “Take nothing for granted.  Question everything.”

Tonight I will be a guest on After Dark Radio  with Anthea Appel at 10:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

Interview update June 18, 2009

Richard Phillips, 3:26 PM (Phoenix Time) 18 Jun 2009

As I sit here preparing for another interview, I wanted to bring you up to speed on my recent activities.  As part of the paperback release of my novel, The Second Ship, I am in the midst of a sequence of book signings and interviews, including an interview by Les Shapiro at Book Expo America in New York City and interviews by blog talk radio hosts Michael Herzog (The American Awakening) and Melissa Hovey and Monica Rawlins ( The Grey Area ).  All of them pressed me on the fact that I have worked as a military research associate at Laurence Livermore National Laboratory and how close my science fiction thrillers come to actual classified research.  To hear the interviews, go to the news page of my website:  www.SecondShip.com

Richard Phillips, author of The Rho Agenda series, begins blog! June 18, 2009

Richard Phillips, author of the #1 best selling Amazon Kindle sci-fi adventure, The Second Ship, Book One of The Rho Agenda.

Hello all.  As the author of the #1 best selling sci-fi adventure, The Second Ship, on the Amazon Kindle, I wanted to take a moment to thank my readers who have put this first novel in my Rho Agenda Series at or near the top of several sci-fi categories.  By way of introduction, I am posting my biography below:

Born in Roswell, New Mexico in 1956, Richard Phillips graduated from West Point in 1979, trained as an Army Ranger and served for several years as an officer in the United States Army.  In 1989, he graduated with a Master of Science degree in Physics from the Naval Post Graduate School, completing his thesis work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  He then spent three years as a Research Associate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, before completing his tour of duty as an Army Officer.  He has been married to his lovely wife, Carol, for twenty-seven years and they live happily together in Phoenix, Arizona.